Lee James Owens

Bio

Lee James Owens has worked for years within the industry & found himself constantly at odds with it’s practices, his role within it & with being a target of it’s rhetoric. He uses his intimate knowledge to critique & question the principles, techniques & representations that have helped shape the world that we live in. He uses fundamental elements of design & references to Modernism through; Colour, Type, Grid, Scale, Hierarchy & Shape to question it’s methods. Inspired by the work of Richard Prince, Barbra Kruger & The Pictures Generation, imagery is stolen, edited & removed from its original context to have its meaning re-evaluated. He refocuses the viewer on a new way of seeing once familiar, even mundane imagery from the past, giving it entirely new meaning. Printed images & type are simply cropped, combined & composed in new ways to throw their original purpose & message into question. Basic shapes & blocks of flat painted acrylic colour are layered on to add or emphasize ideas & focus the viewer’s attention.

Artist Statement

For the Counterparts show Lee has created a new piece entitled Words of War. “My wife is Ukrainian & my son is Australian / Ukrainian. Putin’s horrible attempt to wipe out the people & culture of Ukraine has affected us all deeply. We helplessly watch from afar & experience the horror of war through news feeds, articles, text messages & social media. There are words that have now sadly become commonplace. To the point that they are barely shocking to us anymore.” Lee has taken common words used when describing the war & blown them up into large scale prints. The idea (as is the theme that runs through all of his work) is to remove the words from their original context in order to confront the viewer & to force us to pause & re-examine them in detail.