I still remember the odd reluctance to go outside. It was a melancholy Thursday morning, a rainy, damped and kind of windy day in February. Usually, I would rather stay at home instead, but it was the last week opening of the Laura Owens exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Don’t get me wrong, I love visiting a museum, and I appreciate the class assignment gave me a perfect excuse to throw up all work and hastened to the Whitney. But now, after some unexpected detours, the icky walks on the streets only piqued all my interests.
This is a retrospective exhibit of Laura Owens’s works. Born in 1970, Laura is one of the preeminent American artists of her generation, who is famous for her variety of painting techniques and her abiding interest to challenge traditional concepts about figuration and abstraction in painting and installation. This mid-career survey presents about 70 paintings of her, from the mid-1990s until today, thoroughly documents the perceiving and working process of Ms. Owens for more than twenty years.
Despite her transformation and varieties of works, Ms. Owens’s usually loves to draw by pastel and playful colors, some artworks even marked by goofy personal allusions. This bold and unique character successfully displays an identical style of comedic beauty to amuse viewers in a light mood. Besides, I observe that three essential elements that massively used in her works — mesh, layers, and brushstrokes.
One of the most eye-catching works in this exhibition, untitled 2014, perfectly exemplifies the artist’s boldness in applying different elements in her work. As the photo shows, there is one brush stroke spread across the center of the work, which features a smiling boy with a red scarf and a dog dangling from a long rope in a cartoon-like style. The brushstrokes reveal that underneath the surface, there is a different layer of the same picture hidden underneath. In my opinion, the brushstroke at the center signifies a single event, while the layers beneath it are various representations of the same picture in different temporal or spatial dimensions. The mesh surrounding the picture is meant to strengthen the theme of the interconnectedness of the art piece and symbolizes the idea that different elements in the universe — including the external and the internal, the visible and the hidden — are all connected to each other.
There was a moment; I felt like standing between two mirrors when gazing on this painting. I saw endless images that ever happened to me, surging back and forth to reflect my life. I saw I walked on West 14th streets with full of resentment about the cursed weather an hour ago. And the scene switched to several days before, I was looking for exhibitions for this assignment, and had a craving on watching this one. The fragment of memories continued rewinding even further; I saw one night of two years ago, an anxious man who hesitated to his future, sitting in Starbucks with dimmed light, was preparing GRE test and frustrating on rejections of the admission. My presence to stand here and was inspired by this exhibition is not by chance, never could a result or fact be independent out of the past. That is a course weaved by numerous layers of events happened in each interval of life. No matter good or bad, they keep connecting to carve and shape up to stories one by one.
# Another installation work of Laura Owens exhibits on 8 floor presents a similar concept.
