Romy Owens, Oklahoma City, down in the basement we hear the sound of machines, photographs and thread, 48” x 648”
Romy Owens Although at first glance it might not seem so, Romy Owens’ practice also involves transforming our experience of the urban environment. The Oklahoma City artist shoots digital photographs of city buildings, often focusing on largely overlooked or seemingly insignificant details, such as the empty spaces that frame a graffito scrawl. She sutures portions of these photographs to one another to create abstract tapestries that explore the basic elements of art making: color, line, plane, space. That these concerns are most often associated with painting only heightens the inventiveness of Owens’ practice—she frees photography from its most frequent use as descriptive medium and empowers it as the starting point for an abstract visual language. Owens then reinserts narrative back into photography, not through the subjects of the photographs themselves, which remain largely obscured, but through her process. The stitches are indexes of her time spent in the repeated, ritual task of punching holes and pulling thread through the paper. Handwritten annotations on the verso provide logs of the works’ own making—where Owens began sewing, what time, and what she was watching on the television, for example,
as her thimbled fingers worked needle and paper again. These diary-like jottings paired with the works’ titles—she called a previous series The Keanues after the actor from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and captioned individual objects with movie quotes—add an almost chatty personal dimension that counters the cerebral, quiet beauty of the compositions. The incursion of elements from mass culture into the seemingly rarified world of abstraction reminds us that these exquisite formal arrangements are linked to the world outside art; they are shaped as much by the hum of the TV and grit of the streets as they are by David Hockney’s photocollaged landscapes and the photographs of Walker Evans and Sally Mann. The annotations unravel a little about Owens and the work itself, revealing that her practice, at its most simplified and poignant, is about deconstructing and reconstructing our own worlds, one paper square and stitch at a time. Geoffrey Krawczyk Geoffrey Krawczyk’s project is very much rooted in the world we inhabit, its histories, its present, its contradictions, divisions, and injustices. In Breaking Bread he extends an invitation to the Oklahoma community to share food and conversation with him over a red cedar table. As viewers nibble
the fried bread Krawczyk plans to provide, its greasy residue stains the table’s wooden surface. These stains form a palimpsest over the hand-engraved table top, which bears a map of Oklahoma’s tribal jurisdictions. The marks resemble scars on the indigenous wood, evoking a subtle reminder of the state’s fraught past: of the Indian Removal Act of the 19th century and the subsequent westward relocation of tribes from east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory. A self-identified non-native American artist, Krawczyk offers Breaking Bread not as a confrontation, but in the spirit of collaboration—to forge a dialogue with native Oklahomans of all affiliations about moving forward while not forgetting the past. With this intervention, the Norman-based Krawczyk also enters into an ongoing dialogue in the contemporary art world, participating in two of the most visible strains of art-making in the past twenty years: post-colonial theory and relational aesthetics. Like the former, Krawczyk’s work negotiates the complex issues of identity and history in an increasingly global environment, one that is nonetheless still shaped and shackled by its colonial past. Relational aesthetics becomes the vehicle for the exploration of these concerns. In its participatory, communal
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