Brackish Waters: Painting at the Threshold of River, Body, and Community
Jon Seals
July 17-30
Reception: Thursday, July 30, 6-8pm

Brackish Waters is a place-responsive watercolor exhibition that explores painting as both journey and witness at the fragile thresholds where freshwater meets saltwater and personal memory intersects with shared ecological experience.

Rooted in field-gathered materials and process-driven abstraction, the project responds to the brackish ecologies of the Tampa Bay region. Using water and sediment collected from these liminal environments, I create watercolor paintings that evoke immersion, transition, vulnerability, and renewal.

Large watercolor paintings are draped over irrigation pipe mounted to the wall, allowing gravity, curl, and shadow to activate the work while emphasizing the material's inherent fragility. Framed circular watercolors serve as visual anchors, accompanied by a constellation of more than one hundred 2.5-inch circular watercolor cutouts taken from the margins of larger collaborative paintings created with members of the Tampa Bay community.

Together, these fragments explore the relationship between individual experience and collective identity.

Community engagement is central to the project. Participants are invited to create small watercolor paintings using water collected from the Tampa Bay watershed, contributing their work to the installation. These works explore themes of fragmentation, reuse, community, and collective authorship that are central to the exhibition.

Through site-responsive painting, community participation, and the creation of new work informed by the ecologies of Tampa Bay, Brackish Waters cultivates attentiveness to water as material, witness, and shared inheritance in an era of ecological uncertainty.

Kress Contemporary
1624 E. 7th Ave. Ybor City, Tampa, FL 33605

For more info please visit: Kress Contemporary