“For decades, and especially in the mid-twentieth century, a persuasive reading of modern painting revolved around the idea of the gestalt—the way every element in a painting coalesced into one totality […] Owens thoughtfully implies that the time for gestalts is over, that collage—i.e., something made out of parts or layers—is simply a feature of the life we all lead. Indeed, a big part of our culture is involved with putting things together, with little distinction made between the invented and the found, and even less between the past and the present. The fragmentary, the deconstructed, even the deliberately mismatched—that is our reality. We are all collage artists now.”
—David Salle
Executed in 2013 and featuring a hidden clockwork mechanism, the present work exmplifies Laura Owen's radical and innovative approach to artmaking. Expanding the possibilites of her collage practice, the mechanism highlights the role played by found objects in transforming her paintings into environments
