END OF RESIDENCY WEBZINE

Lexie Owen

My name is Lexie, I'm a visual artist, originally from Canada, currently in Oslo, where I'm about to finish my masters degree.

My practice explores notions of the collective, structures of support and networks of care. I am interested in finding ways to create space for intimacies, in investigating the material conditions that support collectivity, and finding unusual expressions of human agency within the systems and structures that make up everyday life.

My work often takes up autotheoritical / autoethnographic approaches, thinking from my situated position as a queer femme feminist settler outwards. My thesis project is focusing on notions of care and coping in corona times, tracing narratives connecting care and self care to socio-political contexts. It's also about smoking cigarettes.

During the residency i'm going to be focusing on a new body of research i'm developing approaching the shopping mall as a site of gathering. With this project i'm interested in exploring notions of usership and agency, thinking about the site of the mall as a feedback loop, where consumer gesture is observed by the larger structures of surveillance capitalism, analyzed and then re-iterated within the logic of the mall space.

For the first half of the residency I will be working out of NITJA senter for samtidskunst in Lillestrom, Norway where I have a research platform relating to this body of work installed as part of a group exhibition, and will be ATTEMPTING to do some on the ground research in these strange times.

www.lexieowen.com

Participating in the Groundwork for Embedded Practices residency offered the opportunity for many moments of realization and change, but perhaps the most impactful for my practice was the nuanced conversation that emerged out of many threads throughout the residency about the challenges of working between scales.

My work attempts to negotiate with the personal, the social and the institutional – a commonality shared with many other participants. To me, the assertion that the institutional cannot overpower the social or the personal within these practices is the place where the opportunity for real groundwork begins.

Many of the moments of connection I experienced during the residency centered around these notions, I find that often practioners working between these scales can feel isolated in their approach, and the residency created a space for trans-local solidarities to form between different practices, interests, and practioners that share common approaches to a diverse range of questions and concerns.

Coming away from the residency I am left with many questions – how can we attend to all scales equitably? How can the personal engage with the institutional on equal footing? What ethical framework is necessary to approach the social from a position situated in personal experience? How do we speak from and with, without speaking for?