NinaJohnson

Rachel Owens’s work addresses environmental issues, the consumption of natural resources, and the social conditions that sustain them. Working across sculpture, performance, and social practice, she treats material as meaning: what a sculpture is made of is what it means and what it does. She has used bottle shards, cardboard, coal, dismantled Humvees, and marble dust to convey emotion and action, shaping them into forms from porches to ancient trees that link disparate objects and eras. In her recent project Future Fossils, Owens casts the fossilized remains of what is considered the world’s oldest forest (400 million years old). Evoking stained glass, these works emit a celestial glow, elevating the rocks to their status as our plant ancestors.

Owens has been included in exhibitions in the United States and internationally including the X Krasnoyarsk Bienalle (Russia); Franco Soffiantino Contemporary (Turin, Italy); Austrian Cultural Forum New York; the Frist Art Museum (Nashville); Socrates Sculpture Park (New York); and the New Museum window series (New York), among others. Her solo museum project, The Hypogean Tip, commissioned for the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, subsequently traveled to the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in New York City. Her reviews and written work have been included in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Art in America, Modern Painters, Flash Art, and Triple Canopy Anthology. She has received grants from the Joan Mitchell, Pollock-Krasner, and Harpo Foundations, as well as a Cultural Humanitarian Grant from the US Consulate. Her work can be found in many collections in the United States and abroad. 

Owens is Professor of Art & Design and Chair of the Sculpture Department at SUNY Purchase College. She lives and works in Amenia, New York.