The Elemental Dynamic
Taking the constrictions implicit in the childish medium of felt tips to see what might emerge with their garish tones, Laurence Owen makes a series of images which are both disturbing and familiar. He presents us with a skewed rendition of the everyday, appropriating the language of advertising, photographs and holiday brochures to his own ends. Owen calls his felt tip drawings ‘a newsreel of everyday life’, resulting in images that lie somewhere between the fantastical and the mundane.
By employing felt-tips Laurence Owen creates a statement about temporality. If photography often concerns itself with the creation of memories, Owen’s felt-tip creations of snapshots and postcards reveal how memories become the past.