EAMON ORE-GIRON: CONVERSATIONS WITH SNAKES, BIRDS, AND STARS
JAMES COHAN is pleased to present Conversations with Snakes, Birds, and Stars, a major exhibition of new paintings and mosaic works by Eamon Ore-Giron. This is Ore-Giron’s third solo exhibition with James Cohan.
November 7 - December 20, 2025
Conversations with Snakes, Birds, and Stars represents an evolution of Ore-Giron’s ongoing Talking Shit series, which he began in 2017 while living in Guadalajara. In this next chapter, Ore-Giron deepens his artistic dialogue with the iconography of ancient Mesoamerican and Andean cultures while expanding his own pictorial inventiveness. Through bold geometric compositions and radiant color palettes, his paintings and mosaic works conjure the presence of deities such as Quetzalcoatl and Coatlicue and reinterpret artifacts including textiles, jewelry, and pottery—using them as a springboard into new realms of syncretic abstraction.
Central to Ore-Giron’s practice is an understanding that cultural symbols are living entities, constantly evolving over time and as contexts change. The artist is particularly drawn to moments of transformation, when sacred objects become secular, when indigenous knowledge is reclaimed by diasporic communities, or when ancient icons find renewed meaning. His vibrant, semi-abstract interpretations of pre-Columbian deities and artifacts acknowledge these shifting resonances, treating historical iconography not as fixed, but as material for ongoing creative exchange. Talking Shit suggests an informal, intimate conversation about both personal experience and universal understanding of cultural heritage. It is this personal relationship with the past that animates Ore-Giron’s new works, pulling shared history into the present.
The exhibition title, Conversations with Snakes, Birds, and Stars, reflects the expansive universes contained within Ore-Giron’s newest compositions, which are grounded in nature, from the subterranean to the celestial. Anchoring the exhibition is a monumental painting titled Talking Shit with Mach’acuay, the Serpent of the Milky Way, 2025, depicting a snake-shaped figure identified by the Inca in what is called a dark constellation, a figure seen in the dark patches of the Milky Way rather than by connecting stars. Ore-Giron has broken the titular serpent apart into undulating curves, destabilizing an easy reading of recognizable form through pattern and abstraction. Instead, the image recedes and resolves across the composition. The work’s merging forms and gradient colors evoke time’s passing, which unfolds in the banded shades of dawn and dusk that span the raw linen. This implication of temporality is also present in Talking Shit with My Nocturnal Garden, 2025, in which winding vines and flora are depicted in hues that recall a darkening night sky. These new paintings are characterized by an expressive quality that guides the eye through the work, much like one might walk through a garden or read the stars in the cosmos.
In works like Talking Shit with the Decapitator Owl Outside My Window, 2025, Talking Shit with My Death Mask (Morning), 2025, and Talking Shit with My Death Mask (Night), 2025, the artist implicates himself in the paintings, collapsing the emotional and psychic space between the painter and his subjects. Ore-Giron’s practice often addresses the movement of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the ends and beginnings of days, pointing to the rhythms of the world around us and forces beyond our control. Here, Ore-Giron invokes not only the daily cycles of time, but the larger natural cycles of life, offering an exploration of mortality.
The mosaic works in the exhibition represent a new and significant material development in the Talking Shit series. Working with artisans in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Ore-Giron uses smalti hand-cut mosaic glass to create compositions that connect to both Latin American modernist experiments with color and composition and pre-Columbian mosaic traditions and architectural ornamentation. In these works, the artist’s geometric vocabulary achieves a new luminosity, with ancestral and invented forms refracted through meticulous arrangements of colored glass. Ore-Giron is invested in the frictions and evolutions that occur during the translation of an image across mediums and through collaborations with others, a process that creates space for fruitful and unexpected artistic interpretation. Working across multiple disciplines and mediums—from painting and mosaic to music and performance—the artist blends disparate artistic traditions to investigate how cross-cultural influences manifest visually, sonically, and experientially. In Conversations with Snakes, Birds, and Stars, he weaves together memories, lived experience, cultural heritage, and aesthetic touchstones in paintings and mosaic works that exemplify his expansive approach to seeing and making.