On-Kyeong Seong & Jonathan Mess

Feb. 13 - April 12, 2025

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I have long been fascinated with the sewing machine, both as a symbol of domestic labor and as a tool for my art. My work combines the manual techniques of painting and stitches with a sewing machine as the automatic drawing tool.

Jonathan Mess

My artwork is characterized by experimental abstraction using reclaimed ceramic materials and referencing natural land forms, constantly pushing my materials and processes into new territory. I have developed a low-waste making system by collecting discarded ceramic materials and recycling them into new forms.

This exhibition puts into conversation the artwork of fiber artist On Kyeong Seong and ceramicist Jonathan Mess, two talented makers whose processes and use of materials are exciting and unconventional. These bodies of work complement each other visually and also, perhaps, energetically in their incorporation of a similar ethos in each artist’s approach to making as well as in their use - and reuse - of materials. Also shared is a commitment to pushing the boundaries of their discipline. And both bodies of work are tied to the natural world, literally and metaphorically: Seong’s imagery frequently includes representations of flora and fauna, as well as “robust and visceral textures reminiscent of fluids in an organism.” Mess, on the other hand, characterizes his sculptures as “wasteland form[s] of refuse resembling geologic strata.”

Line, palette and texture are integral to both bodies of work, as is a sense of immediacy borne of experimentation and manifested through deliberately induced tensions: between intention and intuition, control and spontaneity, roughness and refinement, strength and fragility. Seong refers to the sewing machine as an “automatic writing” tool, and Mess’s process involves “walk[ing] away [to] let nature shift, dry, and slump the work,