Twenty years ago, Ruth Owens left her medical practice as a plastic surgeon to pursue visual art. Since this transition, she has developed a paint-by-numbers-esque aesthetic that resonates with a kind of quilting of the figure to explore themes of identity constructedness. “Even as a physician, how I thought about the body was based in aesthetics,” says Owens.
Popularized in the mid-twentieth century, paint-by-number kits offer buyers a guided introduction to picture-making, with paint, brushes, and an outlined canvas included with each purchase. Novices are instructed to paint inside numbered sections with predetermined pigments to fill in the prescribed scene. Intervening in this tradition, Owens prompts viewers to color and see outside the lines, to think of the details of personhood as fluid puzzle pieces that might be diluted or thickened with water, turpentine, or additional pigment—to construct a picture beyond inherited delineations. In this way, her work speaks to quilting and collage, a gathering of disparate components to form a more complex whole.
Through painting and film, Owens explores the Black and multiracial figure amid symbolic plants, animals, and ornament. In Godspeed (after Ivan Bilibin) (2024), Owens depicts her son in military camouflage and combat boots after his decision to join the armed forces, a contentious choice in the artist’s family. She paints him almost disappearing into the background vegetation and sunset, his camouflage rendering him part of the landscape, a quilted sum of many parts. He walks toward the viewer alongside a black-winged stilt bird, perhaps a talisman, a totem, or protector. “I painted him this way to keep him safe,” shared Owens during a recent studio visit.2 Additional birds and geometric patterning line the edge of the canvas, creating a frame within the painting and lending a militaristic denotation to notions of border and textile.
In her first installation work, Kidnapped on a Sunny Day, An Ecopoem (2024), Owens realizes a tent-like structure whose walls encompass the viewer with layers of verdant, ornamental fabric. The darkened space feels simultaneously domestic, forested, and carnivalesque. Numerous light box “windows” throughout the tent feature painted film scenes of Owens’ childhood as mixed with animal species from the American South and Germanic folklore. In various vignettes, Owens as a young girl is seen in a pink swimming cap on the beach; her father, mid-cigarette, holding a string of caught catfish; and Owens in pigtails with sass and a bucket of bait, a heron in flight above the nearby waterline. One scene recalls the sunny day when the artist’s maternal grandmother, saddened by Owens’ imminent departure to the United States, fled with four-year-old Owens into the German countryside on a bicycle and under the guise of a trip to the store for butter. The day lives on for Owens as one of family lore, fairy tale, and mythic memory. The events of the kidnapping are further detailed as a recorded poem, audible on loop throughout the space.
The installation’s fabric includes patterns created by William Morris, a British designer of tapestries, wallpaper, and stained glass windows during the Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century. Morris’ motifs feature flattened, stylized leaves, flowers, and swirls of vegetation inspired by Medieval European aesthetics. Owens layers these patterns with African wax print textiles—batik-inspired, colorful swaths of cotton commonly used for clothing in Western and Central Africa. The textile has a complicated colonial history via the Netherlands and Indonesia, but is today considered a Pan-African fashion staple with a myriad of social and cultural implications specific to each design. Layered together, these two fabric lineages frame Owens’ paintings, their asymmetrical borders interrupting the composition to insist upon their own importance and visual prominence in the work. As with her paint-by-numbers aesthetic, Owens shows the mold and then demonstrates how it breaks under the complexity of the subjects and their stories.