"Minutes Past", Pen and Ink with Letratype.
Jessica Smith Owings
6-10 p.m.
OneVillage a Community Church
5700 Nall
Roeland Park, KS
913.400.2060
Hours after Final Friday: By appointment.
Runs through: Oct. 26
Artist’s site: http://www.jesowings.com
Gallery site: http://www.onevillagekc.com
These days, it’s possible to keep the world updated on one’s every thought or action, no matter how minor. (Not always advisable, but possible.)
Jessica Smith Owings doesn’t do the social media things so many of us take for granted.
She doesn’t Facebook, although she once defaced a phone book as part of a performance/printmaking combination piece at the Urban Culture Project Space. And HerSpace, when she’s not teaching printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute or managing Inkubator Press at the Arts Incubator of Kansas City, is the home she’s rehabbing (where the only tweets come from the birds in the garden).
Oh, she’s no digital Luddite; Owings maintains a Web site and is a regular contributor to Press Play Print. But if you want to keep up with her activities, and see the results of those efforts, you’ll most likely need to hop off the computer and catch the artist and her work in person.
Tonight’s opening at OneVillage a Community Church, a joint show with Terri Kay Wheeler, catches Owings perhaps not in storytelling mode, but in that of sharing vignettes. Each of her prints and drawings is a teaser, a hint that draws the viewer into imagining a larger narrative.
(In one case, Owings provides two versions of the same scene. When you come to tonight’s opening, which also features music by Samestate and Nadia Piotrowsky, look for branches and birds …)
Language, landscape, and the disconnect between people and places are thought-filled spaces within which I situate my investigations, Owings writes. Resulting ideas and schemes are supplemented and informed by collaboration, compulsive collection, and random acts of giving.
Today’s featured piece, the print/pen-and-ink Minutes Past, touches on all three of Owings’ thought-filled spaces. The language aspect is obvious, and the words Owings chose to print say volumes about disconnect (which, in this case, appears to be involuntary on at least one party’s part). And while the soft, fine-lined elements that fill the spaces between the lines can be seen as the brows of those closed eyes, they also suggest several possible landscapes.
Those fine lines could be tufts of grass sticking through the snow, or punctuating a still beach scene. They fade into the distance, suggesting a relationship that is doing the same.
Online communication can help to preserve or renew ties, obviously … but there’s still no substitute for face-to-face interaction. It’s the same with art: as affecting as Owings’ work might appear on a screen, it’s even more powerful in person.
Yes, as always, that’s a hint.
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