Advising and Investing in Transformative Leaders
Advising and Investing in Transformative Leaders
Black and white photogram on archival museum board. 20 x 16 inches.
“Hand” was part of the Skully exhibition at the CPM gallery in Baltimore, Maryland showing from November 7 – December 21, 2020.
In this one-of-a-kind piece, Owens reaches into a pouch containing unexposed photo paper with his hand holding a small flashlight, making movements across the paper, and feeling but not seeing the surface that will ultimately record the punctures, creases, and gestures of the light. Owens then hand prints and develops the individual sheets in a darkroom. The resulting ghostly images show glimpses of the artist’s hand coming in and out of a cold cloud.
The unique process that Owens uses to create these surreal photograms exhibits a unique blend of visual as well as performative art. If you follow the movements in the photogram, you can begin to see the struggle between Owens and the black pouch swallowing his arm as if to pull him into the darkness and all of its symbolism.
The fact that this work was performative in nature and yet represented in a static medium is emblematic of the COVID19 era in which it was made: consumed by loneliness, caged-in, mind and hopes clouded, struggling to get out. Owens clever use of the pictogram at the peak of the COVID19 pandemic resembles the radiographs that clinicians see when COVID19-induced acute respiratory distress syndrome “whites out” the x-ray as the patient takes their last breath.
If you look closely, you can see the image of Owen’s hand which appears white behind the dark bar-like grid, adding a deep conceptual layer to his performance. Black men are disenfranchised and systematically jailed in America, with little hope of getting out of the revolving door of the criminal “justice” system. The beautiful and chilling presentation of Owens' hand as "white" might in a sense also bring light to systemic injustice that minorities face.
This piece was featured in an article for the National Organization for Arts in Health here.
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Clifford Owens (b. 1971, Baltimore, MD) received a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (1998), an MFA from Rutgers University (2000), and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program (2001). Owens makes photographs, videos, performances, paper-works, installations, and texts. Solo museum exhibitions include: “Anthology” at the Museum of Modern Art PS1, “Better the Rebel You Know” at Home in Manchester, England, and “Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” “Greater New York 2005,” “Freestyle,” and “Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century.” His on-going, performance-based projects have been widely presented in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Owens was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Public collections include the Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY.