e.e.kono

E.E. Kono, Mori, 2026, Egg Tempera on Shaped Lindenwood Icon Panel sourced from Bulgaria, with Pine Inset, 36 x 24 in     

Elijah Wheat Showroom is soul-stirred to announce our inaugural exhibition,

featuring   E.E. Kono // Dispersion, opening Saturday 13 June, in our new storefront gallery in Beacon, NY. The solo exhibition will run until 27 July 2026. 

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The title Dispersion references both the artist’s chosen medium, in which pigment particles are suspended in egg yolk, and broader themes of generational displacement. The paintings explore ideas of settlement and questions belonging.

Kono’s family lineage is tied to westward expansion, and her imagery examines its enduring, often obscured, influence on contemporary national and personal identity.

E. E. Kono is a painter working between Los Angeles and Iowa who uses the ancient medium of egg tempera to explore American mythologies through a lens of place. The artist’s work incorporates historically relevant materials, such as pigments sourced from culturally significant locations like Dutchess county pebbles and 19th-century factory brick. Her paintings question familiar narratives and uncover the quieter, often overlooked stories embedded in the land itself.

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Kono has chosen egg tempera for both its ethereal qualities and connection to art history. She is particularly interested in the medium’s relationship to the transition between the medieval and early modern periods, when the enclosure of common lands (dispersed lots) in the British Isles helped drive capitalism by producing a landless working class dependent on wage Labor. This period also marked a shift in art: away from the celestial ideals embodied in egg tempera and toward the depiction of worldly, material objects, more readily captured in oil paint. The artist‘s work suggests that, as the postmodern age cycles toward a more holistic future, egg tempera offers an ideal means of connecting to the past while imagining a less corporeal present. 

As subtle as they are beautiful, each work shares a story about the United States and its history. The artist traced her roots to ancestors displaced from Scottish and Irish homelands, drawn by the promise of 19th c. manifest destiny, to settle the frontier that became Minnesota and the Dakotas. They arrived at a moment that coincided with, and benefited from, the forced removal of Native populations. This uncomfortable history is often ignored or excused; as a descendant, Kono acknowledges her own implication within these narratives of expansion. It is a cyclical story of migration that continues to echo in the present.

As you look deeply at Kono’s tempera panels, you witness layered symbolism: Untainted precolonial landscapes; references to diverse mythology; suggestive spiritual embodiment of birds, buffalo, insects, and blossoms; colonial ecocide, and genocide; all cycles of death and rebirth. 

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At a moment when the nation’s history is being increasingly subverted, Kono turns to material as a site of truth, constructing a personal mythology shaped by a shared, imperfect past.