Derek Owens

Derek Owens is an artist and writer living on Long Island and teaching in New York City.

The Art: I'm preoccupied with the tropes of time, memory, and myth. Gathering, sampling, and remixing are recurring methods so it's no surprise that collage and found materials factor in much of the art. I suppose this desire to salvage, preserve, and redesign is my way of responding to "solastalgia", the melancholia of living here in the anthropocene. Whether drawing from ghostly flea market photos or the kitschy poetics of the paranormal, channeling echoes of an imaginal past can bring into focus the ephemeral nature of one's own brief existence. One feels haunted, in other words, while also being a haunt oneself. I find it a bittersweet meditation. This mixture of mourning and wonderment, disquiet and delight, echoes throughout the work.

Image courtesy of Caroline Golden

The Writing: The fictions have a fabulist and magical realist bent. Kirkus Reviews described my most recent book, a collection of tales inspired by the art of Caroline Golden, as "dark, dreamy fairy tales in the tradition of Russell Edson and Donald Barthelme." Lydia Davis meets David Lynch, as another person put it. The poetry, like my visual work, is energized by found materials, particularly snippets of prose from oddball sources (manifestoes on personal magnetism, odd medical histories, treatises by clairvoyants).

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