Derek Owens

Rabbits Must Eat
56″x88″; acrylic, papers, fabric, burlap, netting, strinig, photos, text, grommets, powdered dye on unstretched tablecloth; 2019

Derek Owens
Ronkonkoma, New York, USA

STATEMENT

A book of fables inspired by artist Caroline Golden. Clairvoyant poetry sealed in a cube of ectoplasm. Diagrammatic collage essays. Scrolled fictions tucked inside bottles nesting within a facsimile of hollow earth. Wunderkammers. Spells to silence that cancer of a president. Pillbox poetries. Voyager probe B-sides. Mythopoetical videos made from backyard installations. A preoccupation with twins, doors, and crashing planes. Girl anarchists exploding bombs. All this and then some on my website.

BIO

Derek Owens is a writer, artist, and professor teaching at St. John’s University in New York. The Villagers, a collaborative book with collage artist Caroline Golden, was published in February 2022. He is the author of Memory’s Wake, a work of literary nonfiction about his mother’s traumatic childhood in the “burnt-over district” of upstate New York. He has written several academic books, a number of academic articles, and published poetry, fiction, and lyric essay in dozens of literary journals. He has given close to 100 conference presentations as well as keynote talks, and has exhibited in New York, Toronto, and Berlin. He holds a doctorate from the University at Albany and an MFA from Transart Institute/Plymouth University.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
derekowens.net
INSTAGRAM

IMAGES

Hollow Earth
22.5″x18″x15″; globe decorated with and/or containing collage, bottles, papers,
moss, paint, ribbon; 2018
Would That We Had Loved It More
20″x24″; acrylic, oil stick, papers, ribbon, burlap on canvas; 2020
Four Moon Quartos
40″x40″; paper, doilies, on velvet; 2020
Oh My God Did You Say Pooh Bear You Did You So Said Pooh Bear
15.5″x12″; papers, fabrics, photo; 2019