High Desert Fantasy - Print

archival print | 14x9"

Emily Cowan is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist based on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish Peoples. A lifelong artist, she has explored many different mediums including collage, illustration and sequential arts; she currently works primarily in acrylic gouache paintings.

Cowan's current body of work features paintings of houses, buildings, interiors and domestic scenes. She is interested in the house as a traditional symbol of security and permanence, and as a modern-day symbol of status and wealth. Cowan is fascinated by the houses surrounding her and the fantasies of what it might be like to live in them. As housing costs soar out of control in Vancouver and all over the world, home-ownership has become an impossible dream for a low-income artist. The houses Cowan chooses to paint are a love-letter of sorts, a love-letter to the homes she will never have.

Painstakingly rendering houses that catch her interest in all of their details has become a meditation on the housing and affordability crisis, the artist’s own hopelessness of ever achieving a permanent place of safety to live in, and on society’s messaging around housing and who deserves it.

https://www.emilycowan.com