Justin Bower

b. 1975 San Francisco, California USA

Born in San Francisco, Bower earned a degree in Art and Philosophy from the University of Arizona in 1998 and a Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate University in 2010.

The artist has won and been nominated for several grants and awards, among them The Feitelson Fellowship Grant (2010) and The Joan Mitchell Award (2010).

Statement:

A crucible, a container, a vessel are ancient ideas containing something. Essence. Gods have become drunk from crucibles; Heidegger used vessels as an example of “thingness”; Braque said vases give form to emptiness; in Sanskrit the word Kumbh (vase) translates to womb. In this series called “SOULS: Vessels”, I paint vases, urns, containers of souls, each different from the next. This work emphasizes antiquity and the idea that we are all souls, with dignity, expressing a lived experience, contained in the vessel we are given, the body, the vase. This is the existential and universal idea that we are all embodied, caught between the vase and the urn.