Solo Exhibition: James Sheehan
201 @ 105 Gallery in Chinatown/Little Italy - New York
https://www.201at105.com/

Spongies Cafe in Chinatown, New York https://www.instagram.com/spongiescafe/

The Drawing Center - Installation
NYC, NY
January 23 2015 - October 31 2015
"Death of Malevich" watercolor on matte board, 7/8" x 1"
installed INTO the wall

From Time Out New York - Jan 7 2015
You're going to have to look a bit hard for this long-term installation by ultraminiaturist James Sheehan: It consists of a postage-stamp–size watercolor, embedded in a basement corridor. The image is based on a 1935 photo of the Russian avant-gardist Kazimir Malevich on his deathbed, surrounded by his works, including what is perhaps his most famous painting, Black Square, seen hanging over his head. Sheehan is perhaps drawing parallels between Malevich's work and his own, comparing his brand of visual absolutism (he rarely works on a scale larger than two inches in any dimension) to that of Malevich.

Songs for Presidents
Queens, New York
January 16 to February 15 2015
Solo Exhibition: James Sheehan
at the lek

With at the lek, James Sheehan presents a new body of paintings that ruminate on the nature of creativity, mortality and what it means to make a mark.  His work has long been noted for its approach to scale (many of the paintings are minuscule).  However, his use of scale is misleading. Avoiding the freakish spectacle of painting “on the head of a pin,” the work invites the viewer to trip into a playful dialogue with a single image as an experience. He acknowledges that the act of seeing is something that we do with our whole bodies, not just with our eyes. Through this act of seeing, we open ourselves up to the vastness of history and the specificity of place.
In Sheehan’s words: "scale of these works in relation to the architecture, viewer and socio-political environment are key to their content. Meticulous, minuscule form has a spatial counterpart that is vast and expansive; bodily/physically experienced. This is my painterly dilemma as well as my political one. 'Entering in' versus 'surrounded by' mean something in this context. Intimate yet boundless formally, I want to bring forward a slower, transcendent absorption of an image, to broaden the conversational or dialectical context for that image as it is being interpreted."

The Drawing Center
NYC, NY
July 11 2014 - August 24 2014
Group Show: Small

This group exhibition features a selection of international contemporary artists who adopt an intimate format to explore issues related to visual perception, personal and historical memory, the construction of gender stereotypes, and the power of the imagination. In an age when cavernous galleries and outsized images and objects suggest that bigger is necessarily better, working small carries a certain risk. It is a risk, however, that the nine artists in the exhibition are willing to take as they create minute worlds that absorb the viewer while resisting possession. The selected works range from graphite photo-realist renderings to interventions in found objects to site-specific installations, including a custom-made tabletop bearing microscopic figurations and a postage-stamp-sized watercolor inserted directly into the gallery wall. The artists in Small. are: Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Santiago de los Trenta Caballeros, Dominican Republic), Emmanouil Bitsakis (b. 1974, Athens, Greece), Paul Chiappe (b. 1984, Kircady, Scotland), Claire Harvey (b. 1976, United Kingdom), Tom Molloy, (b. 1964, Waterford, Ireland), Rita Ponce de León (b. 1982, Lima, Peru), Peggy Preheim (b. 1963, Yankton, SD), James Sheehan (b. 1964, San Francisco, CA), and Tinus Vermeersch (b. 1976, Belgium).

Curated by Claire Gilman, Curator, and Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator.

Harbor Gallery
Ridgewood, New York
May 17 to June 15 2014
Group show: Lil' Artworld (7 paintings from early 2000)

Lil’ Artworld presents a group of works that cannot just be looked AT-they must be looked INTO. The artists use transformative shifts in scale to suggest continuous other-worlds in which their work resides. What results is an expansion of energy produced by an intense draw on the imaginative powers. Consequently, the artwork is given room to breathe, as are the viewers, in the midst of the chaos that will be Bushwick Open Studios.

New York State Museum
Albany, New York
September 9 2011 - May 2012
Group show: "Before the Fall: Remembering the World Trade Center"

Before the Fall: Remembering the World Trade Center will display 40 works by 13 artists who were part of a residency program at the World Trade Center from 1997 through September 10, 2001, which was created by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). In late summer of 2001, 25 artists started their residencies in the North Tower (WTC 1) on the 91st and 92nd floors. As events on September 11 unfolded, one artist lost his life, one would escape from the 91st floor and almost all of them lost irreplaceable works of art. Before the Fall includes works that were recreated after being lost, as well as new works created in response to the attacks. They not only document the experience of the artists working in the World Trade Center but also provide a memory of a place that no longer exists.

Gridspace
Brooklyn, NY
October 2010
"Gum" curated by Charles Goldman
https://gridspace.org