‘Take Flight’ at the Diehl Gallery, Jackson Hole. September 2025

This September, Jeremy Houghton presents a new body of work at Diehl Gallery in Jackson Hole, his third solo exhibition at the gallery. Take Flight brings together a series of paintings that continue his long-standing interest in movement – not as spectacle, but as something observed, repeated, and held in time.

The exhibition centres on moments of transition: flamingos in flight, horses and bison moving across open ground, moose following seasonal routes, and skiers descending mountain passes. These are not treated as events in themselves, but as instances of passage – points at which movement becomes visible.

Migration sits quietly at the centre of the work. It is present in the literal sense – animals moving through landscape – but also as a broader condition. The paintings do not attempt to describe environmental change directly, yet they exist within that context. The routes these animals follow are no longer fixed, and the stability of those movements is increasingly uncertain. What is recorded here is not disruption, but the underlying structure of movement before it disappears.

The relationship between human and animal movement emerges without being forced. The skier, for a brief moment, leaves the ground – suspended, directed, and then returned. These moments sit alongside the flight of birds and the movement of herds, not as direct comparisons, but as parallel conditions. Each is shaped by forces beyond immediate control – terrain, gravity, instinct, environment.

Houghton’s paintings are built through a process of reduction. Detail is often withheld, and forms are allowed to dissolve into gesture and rhythm. What remains is a sense of direction, weight, and flow. Movement is not described in full, but suggested – held in the space between what is seen and what is inferred.

The flamingo works form a central thread within the exhibition. Revisited over time, they have become a means of returning to the same question: how to hold movement within a static image. In Take Flight, they appear both familiar and unresolved – part of an ongoing attempt to locate balance between form, colour, and motion.

Across the exhibition, there is no single narrative. Instead, the works operate as a series of observations – each one approaching movement from a slightly different position. What connects them is not subject, but a shared interest in how motion is carried, interrupted, and briefly made visible.

Take Flight does not seek to explain movement, but to remain close to it.