Reconciliation ::: new paintings, in conjunction with the artist’s feature in Prospect.6 New Orleans Triennial

FERRARA SHOWMAN GALLERY is proud to present Reconciliation, the fourth gallery solo exhibition of New Orleans-based artist Ruth Owens. This exhibition features twelve new paintings, ten of which were unveiled this past summer in the artist’s first museum, solo exhibition at the Ohr O’Keefe Museum of Art. The exhibition opens and runs concurrent with Owen’s Prospect.6: The Future is Present, The Harbinger is Home featured-artist exhibition of Black Delight, An Ecopoem; a 4-channel immersive video installation at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. This latest video work marks the largest artistic undertaking of Owens through its more than four-year development in which the artist has extensively researched, experimented, and collaborated to create a poetic display of resistance to extractive forces and human support found in a Black multigenerational dance party, aligned with evidence of nature’s support within our Gulf wetlands. The paintings in the gallery exhibition, all created in 2024, are a product and extension of this video project; marrying and entangling her subjects with nature in opposition to the human forces which seek to control both.

Reconciliation will be on view from 24 October through 7 December 2024 with an opening reception on Saturday 2  November 5-9pm coinciding with the opening weekend of Prospect.6 New Orleans Triennial and the Arts District New Orleans monthly First Saturday Gallery Openings. The gallery will also hold a closing reception on Saturday 7 December as part of the Arts District New Orleans’ annual, year-end event Holiday Cheers also from 5 – 9 PM.

Owens discusses her newest suite of paintings . . .

I am a muddy river, and the sun bright moss, and a fat-bellied spider. I am this wild, wild world, but we are not aligned. I am comfortable and drunk on extracted fruit and I am lost.

I long for a bygone relationship of mutual respect with nature in all its treacherous beauty. As a figurative painter and video artist who dreams of reconciliation between our anthropocentric tendencies and the natural world, I create optimistic imaginaries, all the while acknowledging the disconnect evident in our present ecological relationships. This dream is visual when folks dance fluidly and pelicans glide over waves. It is felt when I bring forth a worldview that is at one with the natural world; the west African Bakongo cosmogram’s circularity establishes the connectivity of all life. I also recognize our misalignment with other-than-human life, formally, in geometrically  irregular painting dimensions, and visually, in presenting a sanitized and controlled view of flora/fauna in wallpaper designs. References for this figurative work is culled from archival super-8 film taken by my parents in the 1960’s. Defying linearity of time, I look to the past and to the future for positive paths of reconciliation with our one earthly home.