English Kills Art Gallery is pleased to present “Grab Bag Sack,” a solo exhibition by Brent Owens. His second solo exhibition at English Kills, “Grab Bag Sack” operates as a sampler of cultural forms, historical and contemporary, rendered in Owens’ characteristic style of woodworking. The work in this show varies from large scale chainsaw hewn objects to intricately carved plywood “paintings.” As he continues to explore his involvement with craft, the scope of the artist’s subject matter in this body of work broadens to include themes ranging from the decorative arts and traditional sculpture to the imposed anonymity of the internet search engine. As a point of departure, Owens works from the premise that culture is the enterprise of augmentation of the natural world, to the end of rendering nature more amenable to the human agenda. The works in “Grab Bag Sack” display the kind of “healthy” disrespect for nature and technical innovation that propel the industry of culture.

Expanding upon a previously employed technique of freehand plunge-routing into wood panels, the artist has created a series of “paintings” that diverge in two directions. One group of routed paintings mimic and transform internet sourced images of Persian and Oriental Rugs on panels of low grade plywood. Another group of paintings appropriates the text of internet medical queries and responses which have been translated from Chinese to English via a program that loses much of the nuance of a human translation. These text based paintings are reminiscent of a cross between national park signage and text-based contemporary art.

The sculptural works on display oscillate between the ham-fisted effect of chainsaw carving and the delicacy of high craft. “Spruce Goose” is a conceptually and visually abstracted goose decoy that teeters on the balance between homage and subversion of the tradition of decoy carving. “To Pieces” is an installation scale linear sculpture composed of carved logs and branches which are crudely hinged and joined. The painted linear elements of this work resemble sprawling bodily limbs that are traversed by a series of carved and woodburned features that vary in refinement and reference sources as disparate as Albrecht Dürer and tattooed “tramp stamps.”