ARTIST BIO

Seth Sexton is a Seattle-based multimedia artist whose current work emphasizes large-scale painting choreographies and meticulous circle drawings. His work is deeply imbued with the mathematics of the natural world. He was raised on a farm in Chimacum, Washington, and studied classical ballet. He received his BFA in painting from the University of Washington in 2003 and an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Painting and Performance Art, in May 2021. Since returning to contemporary dance practices in 2013, he continues to incorporate the rituals and patterns of rural agrarian culture into his visual art and performance work. He is a guest lecturer at the University of Washington and has showcased his collaborative multimedia choreographies and visual arts at Mana Contemporary and Site Galleries in Chicago as well as Seattle institutions such as Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards, Jack Straw New Media Gallery, Soil Gallery, Bumbershoot, Kirkland Arts Center, Auburn City Hall, and others. Sexton has received numerous fellowships, grants, and residencies including the Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, King County Arts Commission, Vermont Studio Center, Oxbow and others.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I am a body creating actions and images. Central to my work are repetition, pattern, and meditation as a reparative act, expressed through the accretion of marked objects into concise states of order. My obsessive movements invoke an acute sense of time and duration. I draw, as a ritual, every day; my drawings take several weeks to several months to complete. My methods encourage diligence, patience, stability, and consistency. Through drawing and dance I transcend into a dream-like meditation where the mundane becomes profound. The resulting images suggest natural and biological forms emanating specificity and sacred geometry. The images draw from spiritualism, Kabbalism, and my dance and Yogic practice. I try to thoughtfully integrate cultural ideas outside of traditional western philosophies and consider iconic, abstract, as well as craft-like forms. I am inspired by the relationship between text and textile, religious reliquary, and "tribal" arts. My drawings are symbolic maps, plotting a course from the inner workings of the body to the stars in the heavens. I make these images to assuage my fears and to temper the paradoxes of science, my biographical history, and the mysterious world we navigate. My drawing and dance choreographies explore the liminal and circuitous pathways of physiology, biology, and psychology, where mental order and disorder are often at the crux.