Melody Owen (thistlepress)

Melody Owen is an ecologically minded conceptual multi-disciplinary artist and writer raised in the mossy, green state of Oregon. She is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery in Portland and has an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts as well as a freshly minted MA in Environmental Arts and Humanities. Her mediums include collage, curation, video and installation. She has shown her work at the Portland Art Museum, Nine Gallery, PDX Gallery, the Art Gym, Reed College, and many other venues and festivals around Portland, the United States and the world. She designed a 30 foot chandelier modeled after the sound waveforms of birdsong which is permanently installed at the Nines Hotel in downtown Portland. She has participated in prestigious artist residencies in Paris, Quebec, Iceland, Switzerland, California and Oregon. She has had books published by several small presses in Portland as well being included in respected Oregon artist collections, and was an Artforum Critic’s Pick in 2015. She has curated video work for Portland Institute of Contemporary Art TBA festival, Cornell University, Hallwalls, and Echo Park in Los Angeles. Her interests have coalesced around concerns about the rapid destruction of the environment and she is especially interested in animals as subjective beings with their own embodied forms of language and culture - as well as how recent developments in technology, especially virtual worlds, may provide an opportunity to rethink normalized assumptions about ourselves in relation to the rest of the natural world.