Pilar Corrias is happy to current Allus Do It Fer Thissen, a solo exhibition by James Owens. This exhibition kinds a part of Gallery 2, an occasional programme of exhibitions by non-represented artists at Pilar Corrias Conduit Road.
Drawing its title from the Yorkshire saying that means ‘all the time do it for your self’, Allus Do It Fer Thissen echoes a quiet name to resilience, an undercurrent that strikes by every of the works within the exhibition. Entangled in foliage or submerged in rising undergrowth, the figures in these work traverse dense landscapes as beings negotiating survival, connection and uncertainty. In Owens’s world, the pure and the human are usually not opposed, however entangled, every shaping the opposite in moments of delicate rigidity, care and survival.
On this new physique of labor, flowers lean, stretch and entangle; crops creep and talk in hushed tones. Nature grows in unlikely locations, urgent by cracks, reaching skyward with discreet willpower. Owens depicts a world the place nature turns into a language of survival, capturing the fragile rigidity between development and decay, connection and isolation. This language echoes the myriad of figures’ personal quiet will to endure; the pure world turns into each collaborator and witness to their fragile acts of self-reliance. While typically not welcomed, figures transfer in dialogue with their environment. Vines hint the road of a shoulder while limbs mirror the bending of branches. At occasions, Owens’s figures draw close to, sure by an urgency to protect each other from an ambiguous menace; at others, they seem adrift, looking out with out figuring out what for.
Architectural parts recur in Owens’s work. Set deep inside an overgrown forest, a theatre stage emerges in “In Heaven Every little thing is Wonderful” (Ode to Lynch), 2025. The forest is dense, shrouding a puppet theatre that feels each inviting and alien, as if it had been by no means meant to be there, but all the time has. In Rigidity Between Lilies, 2025, a tent emerges between two figures who sit earlier than a banquet of vegetation. The figures seem distant, the connection between one another and their environment unclear. Tents, homes, and shire-like constructions seem in Owens’s world as if stumbled upon, functioning much less as shelters and extra as intriguing interruptions, issues to navigate round, to worry or maybe to enter.
Drawing inspiration from Fashionable British painters corresponding to Edward Burra and Graham Sutherland, the work of Hilma Af Klint, and the visible vocabulary of cinema administrators corresponding to Lynch, Hitchcock and Bergman, Owens creates a world the place pure and human forces alike persist in fragile concord, every influencing the opposite by quiet rigidity, connection and the persistent impulse to outlive.
