Shawn Bitters, Tiger on Watch, 2026, screenprint on Awagami Factory Bamboo inkjet paper, 23 x 63 in.
If the Earth spoke to us, what would it say? Kansas City-based artist Shawn Bitters offers a series of encoded answers in Sublime Banter, a solo exhibition of new prints at Sargent’s Daughters. Subverting ideals of Manifest Destiny that accompany depictions of the American West, Bitters instead presents playful and subversive queer solicitations that emerge from active and animate landscapes.
Bitters begins each densely layered screenprint in the exhibition with an appropriated nineteenth century American landscape painting, printed via inkjet onto heavy archival paper. Onto this surface, the artist adds layers of glossy screenprinting which depict an imagined erupting volcano in his own graphic visual language.