EDGES: Summer Exhibition
Seven House Gallery | 800 sq. feet
Role: Curator, Experience Designer, Producer
Artist: Joshua Brian Coverdale
Partner: Joshua Brian Coverdale
Team: Sommer Danielsen and Tyler Cassutt
Sponsored by:
EDGES investigates how ideas move between materials as NY-based artist Joshua Brian Coverdale hones a vocabulary of structural form and pattern. Moving from fabric and paper to paint, household caulk, steel, and shadow, this selection bookmarks a period in which the artist walks away from figurative references to create his own rules between the container and that which is contained. The compositions become a map of the artist’s commitment to discipline and restraint in work and in life.
Joshua Brian Coverdale is an artist emerging from the industrial suburbs of Bucks County, Pennsylvania to New York by way of the fashion industry. Raised by his mother, a fashion designer who immigrated from Trinidad and Tobago, Coverdale's earliest understanding of making came through textiles, pattern, and construction. Coverdale’s current projects span fashion, furniture, spatial design, and painting. His life and work are defined by rebellious streaks and instinctual movement. In a focused series created between November of 2025 and July 2026, the artist asks how discipline can transform construction materials into meaningful objects.
I began working with Coverdale in 2023 as we spoke about his movement between fashion and art over the last ten years. His practice is inspired by the blue-collar community that raised him, creating an approach rooted in a deep respect for hands-on labor where thinking comes through the making. Construction workers, welders, production linemen, and other skilled trades exemplified a way of working built on routine and repetition. Their confidence came from returning to the work each day.
Coverdale works with materials most commonly found on construction sites–employing red rosin paper–a temporary construction material used to protect finished surfaces–as an active part of his process. Shifting across the canvases, the paper helps to create organizational voids in his compositions. The method offers recognizable form across the collection and introduces both an abstraction of and containment for space. Each painting is completed on drop cloth with house paint and caulk. Construction caulk first entered his practice after helping with his mother's home renovation, then the leftover material became a glue for sculptural elements and eventually a textured surface within his paintings. Coverdale’s painting process is entirely floor-based as he moves around the work to paint in and around the paper shapes. The process prioritizes instinctual decision-making over detached observation and framing.
The exhibition is anchored by Coverdale's first work in steel. Extending the language of cut-out into three dimensions, the bench explores weight, void, and the movement of shadow as another composition entirely. Its geometry originates in a series of freehand painted panels that were later translated into steel. Rather than concealing the construction process, the exposed welds and laser-cut paths remain visible allow the steel to behave like steel. Each structural adjustment along the way becomes a part of the final work.
