Laura Owens showcased the artist’s 2004 collaboration with FWM, a suite of hand-embroidered, hand-silkscreened prints. Working with FWM Project Coordinators Olivia Schreiner and Candy Depew, and with embroiderers Courtney Hager, Candace Lathrop, and Lauren Durgin, Owens created seven identical large-scale prints on Indian tussah silk with cotton floss embroidery. When the initial printing and embroidery was completed, Owens made additions to each individual piece, creating seven variants. Considered as a whole, the seven variants depict a tree, and through it, the passage of time—leaves fall, flowers bloom and wilt, worms crawl, spiders spin webs, and clouds pass.
In each piece, Owens displays her graceful sense of composition and design. Owens’ new work includes hints of Asian landscape painting and printmaking, Renaissance tapestries, and early American decorative textiles, as well as nods to painters such as Henri Rousseau and Edward Hicks. Owens’ strong sense of individuality leaves her unfettered by these various traditions and sources; she is able to synthesize this range of information into her own unique painterly language.
Paul Schimmel, Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and curator of Owens’ exhibition there, has praised the open-minded nature of Owens’ practice. Schimmel has said “[Owens] has an uncanny ability to combine a highly personal iconography with a profound understanding of the history of art. She approaches painting collaboratively and conceptually.” Owens has a strong commitment to the medium of painting, and, for her, painting is an intuitive process. She has said of successful work, “you can’t really plan to make it happen. You can just set up the circumstances that make it happen.”
This FWM residency took full advantage of Owens’ openness to collaboration. Working with FWM Project Coordinators, Owens was able to handle the technical challenges of silkscreen printing and embroidery with the same level of confidence and sensitivity to medium she has shown in her painting. Citing Owens’ embrace of intuition and intellect, and her careful attention to both technique and content, Schimmel calls her “one of the most important painters to emerge from Los Angeles in the past decade.”