Laura Owens (b. 1970, USA)
Untitled, 2000

Well… it’s a bit unusual one. Since I realised that it is quite possible that it is not necessarily everybody else who is weird, but rather it could be me, I needed to come up with some respectable re-positioning of my project. To challenge codes on the basis of me not being sufficiently familiar with or interested in them, seems to be a rather futile exercise. Looking from another perspective, I guess I could speak in terms of trying to codify the world in a way that would be more relevant for me compared to other available codes. In other words, it might be considered as an attempt to create my own world (well, in semantic sense, at least). While I am contemplating such possibility, it seems reasonable to start looking at other artworks that appear to be doing the same. Owens’ piece was perhaps the first that I came across while thinking those new thoughts, so I take it on as reinforcement of that line of thinking. The new world does not have to be totally unrecognisable, it can just as well include familiar elements, but in unusual configurations, relations or representations – just like this painting. We’ll see where it’s heading…