Patrick Owens, Postcards from "HOME"

Patrick Owens, Postcards from "HOME"
December 14-February 16

Reception: January 21, 5-7 p.m.

"Since 2009, I have been making regular trips to collect images and objects from the Alabama landscape, or rather evidence of human interaction within the landscape. Generations of my family have lived in Alabama, and I can drive around the state visiting locations that are a testament to this cherished, but dwindling, history. Although I have never been able to call Alabama “home” in the sense that I did not grow up there nor have I ever lived there, Alabama holds an undeniable pull of love, loss, and memory. Visiting my grandparents and aunts and uncles in Tuskegee, with sight-seeing detours to the Natural Bridge of Alabama or Huntsville Space and Rocket Center, even the house where my maternal great grandmother lived or the pond where my dad was baptized, were beloved pilgrimages – infrequent, yet formative, adventures of my youth. These personal journeys to Alabama over the past several years have been a continuation of the childhood road trips across the state with my parents – a reliving of those carefree moments and a celebration of time spent with loved ones, and a desire to reconnect to a place and familial history that I barely experienced."

-Patrick Owens