Current Exhibitions:

What We See, What We Keep EQUINOM gallery | Opening October 9th 5 - 7pm

In Populated Air KARL | on view through October 30th

Jillian Shea (b. 1999) received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts in 2021, after studying at the Glasgow School of Art. She has exhibited throughout the Bay Area at galleries and institutions including KARL, Berggruen Gallery, Good Mother Studio, Berkeley Art Center, and Southern Exposure. Shea lives and works in Berkeley, California. After experimenting with photography in her teenage years, she found capturing light the most spectacular thing. Shea began translating her photographs into drawings and then paintings.

Shea’s paintings begin with photographs pulled directly from her camera roll. Treating the smartphone archive as both sketchbook and memory box, Shea transforms ordinary snapshots into intimate paintings that consider how personal memories are recorded, preserved, and revisited. Her recent paintings focus particularly on domestic life and the emotional landscape of home. Cats, interiors, friends, nightlife, and other seemingly ordinary moments become occasions for looking closely at light, atmosphere, and feeling. Working wet-on-wet, Shea maintains soft edges and luminous passages that allow the photographic source to become something more atmospheric and subjective.

For Shea, painting offers a way to slow down time: to return to a moment and consider not only what happened, but what it felt like to be there. Rooted in photography and the snapshot as a form of contemporary documentation, her paintings explore the increasingly intimate relationship between the camera roll and contemporary memory.