emily owens
Photography
Born in 1988 Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Emily Owens moved to Colorado at seven years old and spent her childhood split between her father’s Lower East Side Manhattan apartment and the coffeeshops and bookstores of Boulder, CO. She now resides in Denver, CO where she has earned a double BFA/BA in Photography and Art History at the University of Colorado at Denver. Devout to her origins in literature and poetry, Owens uses her art historical knowledge to explore or define connections between avant-garde visual, musical and literary movements throughout the 20th century. Her BA thesis explores the influence upon and interpretations of French poet Antonin Artaud on contemporary Feminist visual artists.
Her BFA Photography project What Are You Going to Do With 390 Photographs of Discarded Christmas Trees?paid homage to the late author Richard Brautigan and Polaroid film inventor Edwin Land. Owens is enamored by analog processes and can often be seen with her father’s old Canon AE-1 Program, Holga plastic camera or Polaroid rather than the newly-available digital technologies. While Owens prefers to spend her time in the darkroom, she also utilizes digital scanners quite often in her work, shooting film first and digitally processing them.
Her poetry has been published in various magazines and anthologies, as well as her self-published titles: After All We Only Ever Listened to The Refrigerator Hum, Nothing Consistent/Never, Landscapes in Desperation and her current work-in-progress: Anthology of an Immature Poet. Enamored with print media and analog technologies, Owens collects analog cameras, books, old paper, knick-knacks, outdated telephones, typewriters, and office supplies. She has made the Dean’s List at CU Denver for the last two years and is a grant recipient of both the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program and EUReCA! Fellowship. Owens wishes to continue pursuing her education with a PhD in Art History, and further explore and write about the history with which she is so entangled, as she constantly and helplessly eschews the modern world.
