A Warring Peace, A Sweet Wound, A Mild Evil
Installations such as A Warring Peace: A Sweet Wound: A Mild Evil are not aesthetic objects placed on surveillance stands for public censorship and scrutiny but are incursions into the space which must change its configuration in order to accommodate the invasion. The components Owen uses aren't normally associated with the Fine Arts and include such materials as crushed glass, ceramics, galvanised rain guttering, a rock and found objects.
At one end of the gallery Owen has created an island of transformation: emerging from the floor and the sea of ultramarine powdered pigment, is a rock - an island of solidity in a blur of powdered intensity. Casting a shadow, a reflection, over this image of solidity are two ceramic vessels - the carriers of potential, inverted and closed. Transmuted from carriers of meaning to a beacon of expression, and reflecting the artists concern with Towers and with the transmission of meaning through presence. This island is the beachhead of Owen’s assault on the gallery - the public space. With it he breaches the predominate discourse with a private metaphor - a personal incision on the social body. The extremity to this silent cry lies at the farthest end of the gallery - a precise incursion into the space, a geometric arrangement of shattered glass, glistening with a lunar brilliance supplied by the overhead spotlight. Although in opposition to the island, this incursion reflects the solidity of the island rock with the fragmented auto glass and the ultramarine powder with the light - material and immaterial. Even in this reflected discourse Owen maintains a binary opposition in the reversal of the physicality of each wound. The island maintains materiality (rock)