Ryan Danny Owen: Come Find Me

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Ryan Danny Owen, "Long Over Distance Words Over Silence," 2018

Ryan Danny Owen creates automatic art from his research into the history of queer spaces in Calgary. He has a lot of interesting factoids, like how Carousal Club began as a space to gawk at LGBTQ people in public, before the LGBTQ community bought it and transformed it into an invite-only club. Or how at one point Calgary held the record for most gay and lesbian clubs in Canada – until a series of raids forced them to close.

My practice is an examination of queer identity, loss, love, desire, and emotion. It is a method to explore my relationship to time and history as well as inform an encounter with the absent body and a dialogue that exists outside of time. In my archival project, Mirrors and Windows, I form a growing archive of collected photographs of men from the mid 50s to early 80s. Due to these images proximity to the AIDS crisis, these images document a history with the potential to be lost. I see my work as a demonstration of acts of rebellion, the absent queer body, and a question of what it means to come after.

 - Ryan Danny Owen

Ryan Daniel Owen is a visual artist and writer based in Calgary, Alberta. He received his BFA in drawing from the Alberta College of Art and Design in 2017. His work has been included in exhibitions across Canada and he was recently featured as a performing artist in IKG LIVE 2 and MST: 9. His practice reveals notions of identity, love, loss, desire, and time examining his relationship to that past and a question of what it means to come after.