Catherine Owens is an Irish artist living and working in New York City. Her work is largely installation based, originating from ideas that evolve through drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, sound, LED and 3D technology and Virtual Reality.
Using the technical and production knowledge gained while collaborating on large scale global projects over the last 20 years, Owens has incorporated this information into her current work, creating a series of LED based light works that seamlessly bring technology and mark making together.
In June 2018 she showed a new body of Light Paintings at Oliver Sears Gallery in Dublin, Ireland.
From November 2017 to January 2018 she exhibited a series of LED light based Triptych Paintings and a 360° soundscape at Kustera Projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Owens has exhibited works at Feldman Gallery, New York, Morris Healy Gallery, New York, Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan, the Kerlin Gallery and the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin Ireland.
As well as her own solo art practice Owens is known for her collaborative work with the band U2. As creative director of screen imagery for animation, film and video, she created their visual content for five world tours from 1992 – 2010
She directed and was a producer on the first digital 3D film (U23D) made for IMAX theatrical release in 2008. Shot in South America, its creation spearheaded a series of major technological breakthroughs in 3D filmmaking.
The New York Times hailed it as “The first IMAX movie that deserves to be called a work of art.”
Other collaborative projects include directing visual content and animation for the San Francisco based group Kronos Quartet and for the Chinese Pipa player Wu Man, whose Carnegie Hall debut featured an intricate 20-minute animated series of watercolour, washed paintings.
Owens has attended four Lincoln Center Director's Labs in New York as a guest artist and was a keynote speaker at SIGGRAPH in 2008, where she spoke about working in 3D under the title; Giving Technology Emotion: From the Artist's Mind to "U23D"
In April 2010 she traveled to India to make a 3D documentary about Kumbh Mela, the largest spiritual gathering in the world that takes place once every 12 years.
And in 2012 she shot her third 3D film project, a documentary on the Irish Dancer Colin Dunne - It was broadcast on the BSkyB 3D and the Sky Arts network in November 2012. The Theatrical version was launched at the Jameson Dublin Film Festival in February 2013.
In 2014 she launched "Field Prints" a set of Intaglio prints representing impressions of the vistas found close to her studio in the Blackwater Valley, Co. Waterford, Ireland.
Her recent body of work expands upon the use of LED Lighting technology, merging it with drawing, painting and sculpture.
A large-scale set of her LED Drawings are installed in the lobby of the renovated Capitol Theater in Port Chester New York.
Owens has spoken widely about the interaction between Art and Technology, delivering speeches on this subject in 2018 at the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Ireland, 2017 at INSPIREFEST, Dublin Ireland, ‘The Art Of VR” Sotheby’s, New York and in 2016 at ‘VR On The Lot’ at Paramount Pictures, Los Angeles.
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