Kim Cadmus Owens

In her brightly colored, dynamically composed paintings, Kim Cadmus Owens creates images of the city interrupted by blurs, blips, and sweeping lines. Owens takes inspiration from the digital anomalies that clutter our everyday visual experience, such as computer screen glitches and frozen iPhone interfaces. Her paintings overlay views of the real world with the frenetic forms and freewheeling color of the digital world, resulting in arresting cityscapes like Smoke and Mirrors: Coming and Going, which depicts a street near the artist’s studio in Dallas. In one panel, three-dimensional letters hover over the image of the street like pop-up menus, spelling out names of retail establishments: COFFEE SHOP, ART SUPPLY, HARDWARE, BOOKS. These stores aren’t yet here, though the construction equipment implies that their presence is imminent. At once a portrait of a place in time and a picture of dynamic motion, Owens’s painting draws parallels between the changeability of digital space and that of the real world.