Brent Owens
The most formative experiences of my art education were childhood sessions spent creating irreverent drawings in the back pew of a balcony in a Southern Baptist church. It was in this way that I developed the sensibility with which I approach art making today. What made those Sunday mornings so impressive upon me was a combination of the gravity of fire and brimstone soundtrack, the sense of rebellion in my activity, the constant reminders of mortality, and the gaiety of spending those times swapping crude visual jokes with my young cohorts.
In my youth I spent a lot of time in the private spaces of the working class rural people that I hail from. Those private spaces were filled with memorabilia of lives lived, and the results were often awkward piecemeal studies in interior design. In fact, they were less designed than accumulated. Bits and pieces of folk art and craft, souvenirs from travels, homemade textiles, and objects of sentimental value were pieced together in ways that may have defied established principles of design, but excelled in character and candor. These compositions were clumsy and honest, and they inform my work.
My granddad was a tinkerer, collecting heaps of refuse, or material, that he hoped he might work into something. I fancy the idea that I’ve become something of the same, except that I tinker with ideas as well as objects. I borrow bits and pieces from the visual landscape of the South, and I try to work them into the world that I know now.