James Cobb: Things Into Thoughts

James Cobb: Things Into Thoughts

Through Sunday, Oct 4, 2026

Let’s begin with a noun. Anything that comes to mind. Now, list its physical and symbolic characteristics. My thing is a redwood tree. Tall, strong, resilient, wise, soft, shelter, old, awesome, green, brown, with amber hued bark, fragrant, and rooted.

This game is the namesake of James Cobb’s exhibition Things Into Thoughts. The game is one invented by his mother, played during family road tips with his brother to pass the time and keep the peace. The exercise of “turning things into thoughts” and analyzing them to understand them on an essential level became foundational to how Cobb intuits the world as an artist. Seeing the world through this lens reveals the systems we construct to create order and meaning.

Things Into Thoughts is an installation of two recent bodies of work by Cobb, including oil paintings and digital works. Cobb’s distinct abstract language bridges across mediums. While the tools shift, his essential vocabulary of form and line remain consistent. Cobb’s adventurous, experimental process surfaces unexpected imagery.

The work is not a translation of distinct things, as with Cobb’s childhood game. Instead, it percolates out of daily life, current events, and digi-cultural zeitgeist, intuitively informing shape, color, and form. Emerging from this mental cauldron is a rhythmic visual language, seemingly influenced by an array of fields, from anatomy, geology, municipal infrastructure, and the natural world. Cobbs abstract world is at once closed and expansive, disjointed and interconnected, sublime and visceral.

In Cobb’s paintings, keyhole-like outlines define limits in the compositions and push and pull from foreground to background. The rigid contours both obfuscate our view and provide the apertures to look through to colorful, interconnected, and active systems. The forms in the digital works are much more defined in their object-ness, with sharp lines and defined shapes contrasting against solid planes of background color.

An abstract artist resists specific, realistic, representation and tries to express their ideas through form, color, texture, etc. to operate using visual language. In turn as viewers we often labor to decipher the work and translate it back to source material. The challenge of abstraction is to rest in its uncertainty and essentialism without solving an equation of what the work is “about” and to accept what it is.

Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray
Curator and Exhibitions Director