QUINTIN OWENS
STATEMENT:
I revel in the precariousness captured by describing metaphor as the use of a strange name to transfer meaning; enabling a world of abstraction, imagination and possibility. The strange names I use are objects and materials that carry a pre-conceived value or weight. I choose clay because it has the power to breach both high cultural value and domestic functionality. The physical labor clay demands validates a sense of play. Other materials used may allude to a certain memory or simply serve to help construct the domestic spaces around me. Working in this manner provides the opportunity to integrate my relationship with material into a composition of objects that then strive to articulate a wondrous sense of an encountered place in time.
There is always a struggle to make sense of the disconnectivity between seemingly mythic experiences and the familiar domesticness of everyday living. Images of my life includes rusty high plains dirt, the lush valleys of the Allegheny Mountains, the bed of my dying grandfather, tumbleweeds, cow shit, tortillas, my relationship with my father and the follies of a child. They all become aesthetic predicaments. They are conceived through the provocative and chimerical nature of memory, then gathered and bundled into placeholders to help me recall a moment that can never be had again.
