Jake Bowen: Everything

The Burdock Garage

Jake Bowen, You Are The Light, 2025, oil and acrylic on canvas, 23″ x 32″

Jake Bowen: Everything
Solo Exhibition

November 1 – 28, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 1, 6 – 9pm
Closing Reception: Friday, November 28, 6 – 9pm
The Burdock Garage, Kensington Market, Toronto

In Everything, mixed media artist Jake Bowen presents an immersive four-part exhibition that reflects on the tensions and transformations at the core of human existence. Desire and regret, mortality and renewal, persistence and release all converge on what it means to live fully within the limits of time. Through layered textures and restless imagery, Everything embraces both the weight of inevitability and the beauty of possibility.

Apathy Killed The Little Lamb, 2024, acrylic, oil and mixed media on canvas, 86″ x 46″

Act 1: Everything At Stake (November 1 – 7) opens with the restless pursuit of fulfillment. Ambition is tangled with regrets, clouded by trepidation and stymied by failures. The desired future is warped by riddles without answers.

Act 2: Everything Dies (November 8 – 14) confronts mortality head-on. Every choice splinters toward infinity, yet each path converges on the same horizon: death, patient or sudden, impartial and unyielding.

Act 3: Everything Will Prevail (November 15 – 21) turns to what outlives us. Even as flesh withers, the pulse of life endures and builds on the infinite weave of art, song and memory. Mortality becomes not an end, but a passage.

Act 4: Everything is Possible (November 22 – 28) offers a release into openness. Here, beauty flickers without demand for resolution, freedom replaces control, and possibility itself emerges as grace.

Together, these acts form a meditation on what it means to stake everything on being alive—an exhibition of endings, continuities, and the boundless potential of what remains.

Butterfly Effect, 2025, acrylic, oil, graphite and mixed media on canvas, 49″ x 42″

About the Artist

Jake Bowen is a Canadian mixed media artist whose work balances impulse and reflection, improvisation and structure. His practice draws on the raw energy of graffiti, the vulnerability of journals, and the unpredictability of found materials. By layering paint, spray, pastel, and collage, he builds surfaces where accident and intention coexist—spaces that feel both unsettled and strangely inevitable.

Recent projects include solo exhibitions in Brantford (Mind Games, 2022) and Montréal (No Rhyme or Reason, 2023). In 2025, Bowen completed a summer residency at OCAD University, further developing the process-based approach that fuels his upcoming four-act exhibition Everything in Toronto.

At the centre of Bowen’s practice is the idea that life is never fixed, only unfolding—every choice a risk, every moment an opening, and everything, always, at stake.

About The Burdock Garage

The Burdock Garage is a mixed-use creative venue located at 6 Denison Square, directly in front of Burdock Brewery. Dedicated to fostering Toronto’s local arts community, the Garage provides an open and adaptable space for pop-ups, performances, and events. Everything will be the first month-long art exhibition hosted in the Garage, marking a new chapter in its role as a site for cultural engagement and artistic exchange.

Burdock Brewery
6 Denison Square
Toronto, ON M5T 1K8
burdockbrewery.com
info@burdockbrewery.com
416-546-4033

Instagram @burdockbrewery

Accessibility:
The Burdock Garage is fully accessible.

Image Descriptions:
1. The painting titled You Are The Light (oil and acrylic on canvas, 23″ x 32″) depicts two figures on a blue backdrop with a black “cloud” and a pink sphere in the sky. one figure is more distinct and is wearing a grey hoodie and black and white checkered pointy hat. The other figure is a ghostly indistinct figure who has it’s hand resting on the other figure’s shoulder.
2. The painting titled Apathy Killed the Little Lamb (acrylic, oil and mixed media on canvas, 86″ x 46″). I sprawling image mostly of a blood red hued backdrop with scattered figures and objects littering the canvas such as a sky scraper, a hammer, a candle and a lamb.
3. The painting titled Butterfly Effect (acrylic, oil, graphite and mixed media on canvas, 49″ x 42″) depicts three figures at chest heigh entering the frame one at a time from the lower right corner. Each figure is made up of multiple faces expressing varying emotions. The background is a gradient black to grey from left to right with an indistinct figure flying overhead and a small orange butterfly in the middle.