Patrick Owens

2020, found objects

Quality Work is a piece regarding corporate greed in America, partly evidenced by the red, white & blue color scheme of the two signs. When I began assembling this work, I was specifically thinking about the family dairy farm in Tuskegee, AL and how my family was forced to declare bankruptcy once the banks called in the loans. I was also thinking about ideas such as wage theft, ageism, employers fighting against unionization, and the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas companies.

The aesthetics of the assemblage resemble the office of a textile mill, abundant in Greenville, SC where I live, once touted as the textile capital of the world. The wood paneling is also reminiscent of my grandmother’s house, which was covered wall to wall in the stuff.

2020, found objects

Welcome Home represents the fragments of memory. All the items collected here reference the home; linoleum from the kitchen, wallpaper from the living room, a handmade quilt, etc. The items also have a particular age – the age of my grandparents. I only ever knew my paternal grandparents, and they both died when I was young, so the memories I have of them are only fragments.

This piece is also an ode to Walker Evans and William Christenberry. Most of the objects were collected from locations around Moundville in Hale County, AL, including Mills Hill where Evans photographed for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Christenberry’s Guinea Church. The quilt top was purchased from America’s Thrift Store in Tuscaloosa, directly across the street from Memory Hill Gardens where Christenberry is buried.

An extra little tidbit, the shotgun shells were collected along the road between Mills Hill and China Grove Church. The dirt road turns into an unkept forest road with extreme ruts. Well, while cussing and walking back up the road towards Mills Hill as I waited for a tow truck, I happened to glance down and see the shotgun shells.

2020, found objects

Welcome Home 2 is a companion piece to Welcome Home. In it I am playing with the same ideas of the first assemblage with added components representing home – a picket fence, Coca Cola bottles, and clothing.

2020, found objects

American Pride is simply the culmination of years of feelings as I watched in daily disbelief at was happening in our country during the Trump administration. In this work I play with repetition of shape, triangles and vertical lines bisecting ovals, and a bit of color mixing with red, blue, and purple.

The piece directly relates to an abandoned house that I came across in Marion, AL. As I approached the house, there were several American flags draped across the porch, and inside I saw this great mirror frame sitting above the fireplace with a purple flower attached to it.

2020, found objects

Whitewashed started as an exercise in how to relate two seemingly unrelated objects, both of which had been painted over. I decided that I could connect the two objects by playing with leading lines, white paper tapes with blue lines running down the middle, so the eyes could travel from each object – white to blue and blue to white.

I realized that each object represented power in some way; the fallout shelter sign representing nuclear power, Mary representing the power of religion or the church, and the paper tapes recorded electrical power usage. I then began to think of ideas such as evidence often being whitewashed by the powerful; for instance, consider how the Bush administration lied about Saddam Hussein’s proliferation of WMDs or how the Catholic Church is seemingly always in the news because of priests’ inappropriate relationships with children.

2020, found objects

William Christenberry said the reason he made his “building constructions” was that he had an overwhelming desire to physically own a particular structure. There was a gourd tree in Tallassee, AL that I had photographed, and I also wanted to physically own the object, so much so that I literally intended to bring it back home with me on one trip. Unfortunately, the gourd tree had already been removed from the property. Well, the next best thing was to create my own gourd tree inspired by the one I photographed. So began No Trespassing.

I “scoured” the land looking for the right parts. Relating the work back to Alabama, other than just memory, the base is filled with Alabama soil, the gourds were purchased from a farmer in Horton, and the wooden 2x10s are the frame of an old marquee sign that my grandfather helped build for the family church in Notasulga. The rotten eagle was the icing on the cake, something that I had looked at every day for years on my way to and from work.

This piece speaks to the historically unwelcoming nature of the United States – the supposed land of the free – with the genocide of native peoples and slavery of Africans and more recently the “Muslim Ban” and the hatred spewed at Asian Americans because of the “China Virus” and so on.

2020, found objects

This work was inspired by my brother, who upon seeing the amount of junk that I had accumulated in our studio remarked; "Who do you think you are, Marcel DuCHUMP?!" The work references Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel (1913) and is indicative of his use of the readymade. I play with color and repetition throughout the piece: yellow and blue lead to green, green and orange lead to brown; two rotating fans, two Mason jar lids, two clamps, two bottles; even the shape of the hanging cord mimics the tail of the weathervane.

The work is human scale, being a similar height to myself, and I like to think of the piece as two people having a conversation. The conversation is regarding the rebranding that companies have been making over the last few years. Product iconography that portrays racial stereotypes, such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, and even Mrs. Butterworth, is being overhauled to align with more responsible 21st-century understanding.

2020, found objects

2020, found objects

2020, found objects

2020, found objects

2018, found objects

Southern Experience began with one word, vernacular. Vernacular is a term that I’ve often used to describe my photography. When looking at the definition of the term, I pulled out words such as common, unmonumental, ordinary, domestic, functional, and expanded the definition beyond merely spoken language and architecture.

I wrote a list of common, everyday items that to me represented the South. A list that included a lot of food – biscuits, gravy, grits, nanner puddin’, bbq, okra, but also items such as cotton, cicadas, red clay, and Spanish moss. I knew I wanted to use a Berg motion display cabinet to showcase the objects, I always loved playing with those rotating shelves as a kid when visiting antique stores with my mom. Obviously, some things on my list would be a little difficult to display, and I ended up choosing natural materials, although I still love the idea of having gravy in a sculpture.

Pertaining to memory, the presentation with the chair sitting in front of the cabinet, inviting viewers to participate, is reminiscent of watching nature shows when I was younger. Seeing as these cabinets are often found in pawn shops, the piece can speak to the climate crisis and how we are pawning off our natural resources, and how perhaps one day the only way we might be able to experience some of these natural objects is through documentaries or natural history museums.

2018, found objects