Stowaway is pleased to present ‘Closeness’, a solo exhibition by Hudson Valley-based Scott Vander Veen. Vander Veen presents 13 wall works and an installation of prints. Please join us for an artist reception May 16, 2026, from 5–8 pm.

Working across sculpture, printmaking, and painting, Vander Veen’s practice is rooted in questions of identity, desire, and the relationship between abstraction and representation. Closeness centers on his ongoing engagement with an archive of gay erotic imagery, material he treats as a record of explicitly subversive, underground cultural production. Many of these images circulate online with simple geometric shapes obscuring their content, and this collision of censorship and abstraction is a generative starting point for the work. Vander Veen transforms these images through layers of physical material: wood, plaster, fiberglass, and hardware, along with layers of inlay, silkscreen printing, and painting.

Vander Veen is interested in the emotions that cross between human and object: empathy, disgust, and desire. His work beckons the viewer to draw close. What may read legibly with distance devolves and collapses into abstraction in close proximity, becoming something more visceral. The resulting works resist easy legibility, inviting viewers into an experience that is as much haptic as visual, concerned with distance, desire, and the emotional charge of the materials themselves.

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Scott Vander Veen is a multidisciplinary artist working between painting and sculpture. His approach to art-making is omnivorous in its methods and utilizes materials such as wood, handmade paper, clay, latex, canvas, glue, grommets, plaster, silk, misappropriated text, paint, found photographs, and zipper. He received his undergraduate degree in studio art from Bard college and an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. He has spent time as a fellow at Penland School of Craft and Ox-Bow school of Art and is a Windgate Grant recipient. His work has been shown in New York at Below Grand, Field Projects, The New York Studio School, Andrew Reed Gallery, and Springs Projects, as well as in Los Angeles, at Abigail Ogilvy Gallery and Stowaway. He has also exhibited at Queens University Gallery in Charlotte, Finlandia University Gallery in Michigan, and RISD Museum in Providence.