Sat 2/27-Sun 5/30
Los Angeles-based artist Laura Owens in 50 now, and has had a successful career as an artist and arts educator. But for her show Laura Owens: Rerun, opening at the Transformer Station this week, she takes a trip back to her youth in Norwalk, Ohio, through the eyes of contemporary Cleveland teenagers.
For this show, she’s spent more than two years working with nine high school students who are part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Currently Under Curation program, holding bimonthly meetings with them. Owens collaborated with the students to plan and choose both new and previous work for the show around the theme of time travel — something she’s kind of doing in the show’s template as she reconnects to her own Cleveland past through them.
The show will feature some works that are well known through the many shows she’s had, as well as some of her never-seen-before work from high school. It will also include a site-specific installation of Owens’ distinctive handmade wallpaper, plus objects from the CMA’s Education Art Collection, which are used as educational tools in schools and community engagement programs, harking back to the years she spent at CMA studying the collection, before she left northeast Ohio to attend the prestigious Rhode Island school of Design. The wallpaper installation uses images taken from this collection.
In addition, Owens and her student collaborators crafted a time capsule that will be buried in the CMS education department’s archives until 2031. Owens created the capsule and the students chose what went into it.
“The cross-generational conversation with the CUC high school students was one of the most productive and inspiring collaborations I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of,” says Owens in the show’s press release. “Their influence on the work I’ve made for this show can’t be underestimated. I owe a debt of gratitude to the teens for their thoughtfulness and the generosity with which they shared their excitement and ideas. The buoyancy of our inspirational conversation kept me afloat through the COVID pandemic.”
The show wi be on view through Sunday May 30.