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About the Exhibition
Salon 21 is pleased to present “Vignette,” a group exhibition, opening to the public on September 12, 2025. This exhibition will be Salon 21’s first in its new location at Water Street Associates (WSA) in the Financial District. The group show includes works by Ben Cowan, Allyson Keehan, Thérèse Mulgrew, and Carly Owens Weiss.
“Vignette" brings together four contemporary painters whose practices embrace the materiality of paint while reimagining the quiet power of stillness, symbolism, and personal narrative. Through hyperrealism, art historical references, and investigations of the body, the works in this exhibition elevate the overlooked, such as objects, gestures, textures, into richly constructed vignettes that confront the complexities of identity, memory, and representation.
About the Artist
Carly Owens Weiss is a multidisciplinary artist based in Boulder, Colorado. She holds a Bachelors of Art and Design from North Carolina State University and a degree from the Royal School of Needlework in the UK. She is interested in the violence of contrasts and navigating the emotional responses that arise from the juxtaposition of the familiar with the unusual, the mundane with the irrational. Referencing art history through a feminist and psychological lens, Owens Weiss recontextualizes vanitas tropes to address modern anxieties around gender, selfhood, and the body.
Her homage to Ingres' “Grande Odalisque" in grisaille, alongside intimate studies of hands, textiles, and vegetation, evoke the push-pull between seduction and alienation. In her paintings, she draws parallels between objects, the body and the experiences lived within it to create contemporary vanitas imagery that discusses modern anxieties through antiquity. Her practice focuses on the recontextualization of imagery present within the art historical canon.
