For The Armory Show 2026, Lobster Club presents a new body of work by Ohio-based artist Megan Koons. This marks her first solo presentation at a fair and Lobster Club's inaugural Armory, bringing together a selection of her paintings that merge acrylic color fields with handwoven textile.
The surfaces of Koons' canvases shift between depths, a quality created by fusing a painting and weave into a single canvas. Some marks sit sharp atop the weave; others are obscured below it. It's this filtered texture that captures a landscape, albeit one passed through memory's hazy lens. Wavering between present and remembered, the work retains the feeling of a place while its precise details slip away.
Her process begins close to home in Rocky River, Ohio: the wooded trails, creek beds, and Metroparks she visited as a child before leaving for art school in Chicago. Years later, she returns, now accompanied by her children, experiencing the same landscape across different seasons and light, and with fresh eyes. Their outings are frequent, each time Koons gathers references in the form of photos or drawings, before folding the many memories into a single canvas composed of three painted layers.
Working directly on a hand-strung loom, Koons applies a first layer, capturing the overall light. As she weaves the painted net, the image begins to shift with each pass of the shuttle. Next comes the underpainting on the canvas itself, followed by the final marks atop the mounted weave. A yellow dab is a flower head, a dark vertical a tree trunk. Each addition alters the visibility of an earlier layer, partially obscuring what came before. Reflecting on the process, Koons compares the layering to memory itself: 'like trying to remember different parts of it.'
Landscapes appear, disappear, and reform, both in the making of a work and in the experience of a finished one. Each canvas functions as a self-contained memory of a place; in sequence, the collection represents what accumulates over a life, the feelings that remain while the original image is abstracted away. Sit with a work long enough and a landscape drifts into view, a place you've never been but recognize nonetheless.
Megan Koons (b. 1986, Cleveland, OH) lives and works in Rocky River, Ohio. She received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Recent exhibitions include Lobster Club in Los Angeles, New York, and Hudson, as well as Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton.