Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Meditations on Nature, an exhibition featuring works by Texan artists Sherry Owens and Suzi Davidoff. Owens and Davidoff use natural elements as their media to explore environmental concerns and celebrate an emotional connection to the flora of Texas.
Owens meticulously builds her unique sculptures using crepe myrtle twigs, creating densely chaotic nest-like forms that read like open drawings in space. Her dynamic works represent the beauty and fragility of the natural world, while on a deeper level explore intrinsic connections between spirituality and ecology. The tangled branches in Owens’ new work Keep Me Warm One Night mimic the lair of a wild animal suspended in air. The piece focuses on the crises surrounding biodiversity, loss of habitat and the destruction of nature’s inherent rhythm.
Davidoff creates drawings, paintings, prints and installations that consider intricate patterns in nature and the overlaying systems used to observe, map and define organic landscapes. The plants she collects on long hikes inspire her work, and she often uses found materials like clay, cochineal and lichen as media, rubbing them into the surface of the paper and panels to create beautifully subtle effects. Her works play out like diaries of her meditative walks, recording her encounters with nature, while representing her spiritual connection to the land. Her new series, entitled Madera Canyon Cycle, was inspired by the growth, resilience and diversity of the ecosystem in the mountainous area of West Texas after devastating wildfires.
About Sherry Owens
Owens, a native Texan, resides in Dallas. She received her BFA from Southern Methodist University in 1972. She was awarded the Moss/Chumley North Texas Artist Award in 1999, named the West Texas Triangle artist in 2010 and received the Artisan Award from the AIA Dallas in 2014. Owens has exhibited nationally and internationally, and was recently featured in the exhibition entitled Texas! in Delhi, India. Her work is in numerous corporate and public collections including: JW Marriot; American Airlines; Meadows School of the Arts; the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Honolulu; Neiman Marcus; City of Dallas Office of Cultural Affairs Public Art Collection; and the Texas Sculpture Garden.
About Suzi Davidoff
Davidoff is based in the Chihuahuan desert of West Texas. She attended the University of Texas at El Paso for her BFA and New Mexico State University for her MA and MFA. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States. The Galveston Arts Center featured her work in a two-person exhibition, Second Nature, in 2007. In 2009 she was awarded a Fiskars Artist’s Residency in Finland and has also been the recipient of the Mid-America NEA Fellowship and a Ford Foundation/ Pollack-Siquieros Binational Art Award. Davidoff’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; Hallmark Collection; Museum of Texas Tech University; and the El Paso Museum of Art.