Rachel Owens

Rachel Owens makes work that addresses environmental issues, the consumption of natural resources, and the social conditions that inform that consumption. Working sculpturally, she approaches material as a determining factor in producing meaning: what a sculpture is made from thus plays a central role in what it means and what it does. Across various projects, she has incorporated glass bottle shards, coal, pieces of military vehicles, and marble dust to convey meaning, emotion, and action, often linking disparate objects and spaces across time.

In her recent project Future Fossils, Owens tells a deep geological saga spanning 400 million years, revealing the connection between ancient trees and ourselves. As a visiting researcher in the New York State Museum’s Paleontology Department, the artist produced three-dimensional digital scans of the fossilized remains of some of the world's oldest known forests, those that originated in the Devonian Period along the banks of a vast sea where today’s Catskill Mountains lie. Through a process of digital printing, hand-built molds, and poured resin casting, the museum replicas are transmuted as an amalgam of broken glass, resin, dye, and natural materials. These sculptural elements serve as botanical documents of the Earth’s landscape prior to the Carboniferous period. Cast in an amber-like resin, Owens’ sculptures from her newest series Terrane make fossils of our present-day consumer waste. Conceived as portals suspended in space, the rectangular compositions offer a reverence and warm radiance as much akin to stained glass as to the specimen trays and sedimentary formations that preserve evidence of our plant ancestors.

Owens has been included in exhibitions both in the United States and internationally including the Krasnoyarsk Biennial, Franco Soffiantino Contemporary, Austrian Cultural Forum, the Frist Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the New Museum Window. Her project The Hypogean Tip was commissioned for the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, CT. It subsequently traveled to the Sugar Hill Museum in New York, NY. Owens’ work has been included in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Der Standard, Art in America, Modern Painters, and Flash Art. She has received grants from the Joan Mitchell, Pollack 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.