Jacob Muldowney’s Thresholds

The word “threshold” is an apt descriptor for Jacob Muldowney’s work. Muldowneey’s drawings are anything but facile. His process employs an almost compulsive amount of layering, editing and second-guessing in an effort to extend the activity of drawing beyond the initial statement.

The material results of this practice are drawings that possess a richness of body and texture beyond what one would normally associate with the medium: objects that that stand somewhere between drawing, painting, and bas-relief.Pictorially, these drawings frequently ply the line between abstraction and representation. This paradoxical use of imagery becomes a further metaphor for the threshold, standing between figuration and abstraction; between interior and exterior; between visible and invisible; between celestial and terrestrial.

Muldowney is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the James P. Bonelli Jr Prize, the Robert A. Ricker Memorial Landscape Prize, the Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award, as well as recently being nominated for the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture.