In her third solo show at ZieherSmith, entitled Harboring, Rachel Owens creates a landscape littered with debris reborn into stilted, anthropomorphic forms and geo-political tableaux. Reforming palettes as pedestals, beer bottles into stained glass, and oil drums as frames, the artist uses reclaimed materials to both recycle and criticize the detritus of industrial and civic waste. In all, the exhibition continues her exploration of paradoxical current affairs as well as our individual tendency to feel powerless to confront the crises of our surroundings. An emotional resonance takes the works beyond any one single issue and into a universal realm.

In The Take Down, Owens’s torn and battered chain link fence is being overcome by vines of broken bottles which transform the sunlight into a kaleidoscope of green and brown. While the piece speaks to interactions between human civilization and nature, Owens is further exploring the dynamic between one man-made structure representing restraint (the fence) and another man-made structure which is loss of control (garbage).

Owens’s recent installations, such as Groundswell at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2007-08, have featured birds as a point of reference for the viewer’s identification and personification of quiet resilience. Several new works are populated by these creatures, crafted from old oil canisters and other remains. They sit atop the branches sprouting from the PVC piping in the fountain piece, The Trickle Down Effect, Owens’s industrial Daphne. Another bird supplants the visage for Self-Portrait’s spindly crutch figure.

In 1988, the then sixteen-year-old artist visited her missionary father in South Africa and was able record a brief interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Her questioning of humanity elicited patient, poignant truths from the Nobel Peace Prize winner. His answers voice the video School, a South African montage contained inside a rusty barrel stabilized by sandbags stitched from a toile fabric featuring idealized peasants, a decorative notion closely tied to colonialism. Maintaining that “human beings are human beings are human beings,” his words are mixed with tolerance and resignation.

Owens received the 2007 emerging artist fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park. Her work has also been seen in Empathetic, curated by Elizabeth Thomas for the Temple Gallery, Philadelphia as well as in group shows at Francosoffiantino Artecontemporanea, Turin and Lehman Maupin, New York. Her fountain installation, Wishing Well, was featured at the 2007 NADA Art Fair.