Jason Bailer Losh: If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride
Anat Ebgi Gallery
October 31 – Dec 20, 2025
In his third solo show with Anat Ebgi, New York–based sculptor-painter Jason Bailer Losh presents If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride, an installation of new paintings, sculptures, and a video work arranged inside a site-specific interior he built from exposed studs and translucent plastic sheeting. The environment feels half–half-construction site, half–memory chamber, an in-between space where the past is both protected and unsettled.
Losh has long mined the materials and visual language of his Iowa upbringing, merging them with the formal clarity of modernist sculpture. Here, that mix is sharper and more distilled. His works pull from mid-century domestic scenes, family archives, and the objects—both handmade and inherited—that shaped his early understanding of craft. The result is an exhibition that treats memory not as a stable record but as something fractured, reassembled, and occasionally estranged from itself.
The installation includes a striking two-panel painting of a young deer, positioned within what looks like a mid-century living room. Losh overlays the fawn with looping, diagrammatic lines—part anatomical map, part cosmic diagram—that pull the scene away from nostalgia and into something more uncanny. Hung within the skeletal room frame the artist constructed, the work becomes both image and environment: the innocence of the animal is set against the raw studs of the gallery architecture, turning the whole corner into a hybrid of childhood memory and a room still under construction. It’s a moment where Losh’s interest in domestic interiors, personal biography, and fractured time converge with unusual clarity.
Losh’s sculptural language mirrors the same tension. Assemblages built from pine, steel, tin, painted wood, and hand-carved forms feel at once lovingly preserved and slightly out of alignment, like keepsakes rebuilt after being lost. These objects carry the emotional imprint of heirlooms while maintaining the formal tautness of studio sculpture. Their placement on custom pedestals suggests domestic relics elevated to the status of archeological fragments.
One of the exhibition’s most commanding works is a mixed-media sculpture featuring a bent steel frame cradling salvaged wooden blocks, a tin ornament, and a carved form recalling a child’s hobby horse. The arrangement feels both makeshift and ceremonial, its balance precarious yet intentional. It crystallizes the themes running through the show: the pressure of inheritance, the reordering of memory, and the quiet force of handmade objects in an increasingly digital world.
That digital world is not merely implied. Losh uses a custom-trained AI to distort some of his paintings before translating the manipulated images back into physical form. The technology introduces slippages—warps, bends, recalibrated proportions—that interrupt the seductive pull of nostalgia. The artist describes the past as “forever unreachable” and the future as “discomfiting because it is unstoppable,” a single statement that encapsulates the show’s emotional register: longing edged with unease.
Taken together, the exhibition forms a compact but potent meditation on American domestic life, filtered through personal biography and sharpened by formal intelligence. Losh is not interested in preserving memory; he is interested in working it, reshaping it, allowing its fractures to surface. The skeletal architecture of the installation makes that process literal. You are not simply viewing the work—you are walking inside its scaffolding.
At a time when contemporary art swings between handcrafted nostalgia and digital experimentation, Losh manages to inhabit both without succumbing to the clichés of either. His objects feel lived-in but not sentimental, technically assured but never cold. They are, in their modest scale and quiet strangeness, vessels for a story about identity, inheritance, and the objects we carry forward even when we do not always know why.