Kate Owens
Friday, 27 April 2012
Work from her oeuvre.
“There is an argument that contends that we only really become sensitive to a given object’s characteristics – its truth – when it is no longer able to perform its prescribed function. According to this logic, the hammerness of a hammer becomes most apparent when we see it lying unused and broken – without a head or snapped by the stem.
Kate Owens asserts the possibility that a break, mark, glitch or rip offers a kind of conceptual freedom to an object. In this new series of works, Owens intertwines objects and materials, testing the properties of one item with the willfully incompatible properties of another, to create moments of unexpected consequence. These combinations push objects to the limit of their functionality in order to reveal their core attributes or weaknesses.
Liberated from prescribed use, Owens’ objects are afforded the possibility of becoming something else, of doing something else. Thus we encounter her work in the transient state it creates for itself, in the superficial – yet acutely pure and present – way in which it simply is.” – Seventeen Gallery