I’m a a mixed-media artist and writer whose practice treats text as image and cosmology as composition. Working across collage, painting, and digital reconstructions, I braid vintage ephemera, childhood drawings, and studio debris into diagrammatic families. A longtime professor of writing studies, I bring a research cadence to the studio—field notes, poetry, and fiction accompany much of the work—so that each piece invites restaging and close reading. I aim for a result that is lucidly handmade yet technologically conversant: archival and speculative in equal measure.
Processes & materials: Mixing, layering, mashing, sampling. Collage, mixed media, digital blending and conjuring. Poetry, prose, found text. Ink, acrylic, oil stick, watercolor. Scissors and glue. Vintage papers, flea market finds, childhood drawings. Old clothes, upholstery remnants, library discards.
Themes & preoccupations: Portals, fabulism, magical realism. Kitschy paranormal poetics. Cosmographies, exoplanets, the music of the spheres. Hollow earth, mundus imaginalis. Hauntology. The surreality of the child brain. Solastalgia. Anthropocene and the sixth extinction. Remembrance.
Teaching: St. John's University, NY. Harvard University Expository Writing Program. Arts-based research; experimental writing. Sustainability as pedagogical ethic. MA and Doctor of Arts from University at Albany. MFA from Transart Institute/Plymouth University.
Living on Long Island, New York.
contact@derekowens.net
Selected Exhibitions
"Nine-Box Grids," Art League of Long Island, August-September 2025.
“aeolian harps”, Labocine, August 2025 issue.
“Our Rabbits Whisper Their Escape,” Digital Art, Assemblage and Collage exhibit, Limner Gallery, Hudson NY, June 19-July 12, 2025.
Digital art on exhibit at Future Fest, Orillia Opera House Eco-Art Exhibit, “Your World Soon”, Sept 26, 2024, Ontario.
“One Is Underwater in the Heart of the Wood.” Mixed Media , Part Crowd Gallery, Toronto, July 1 - August 31 2024.
“Corona,” “Tree Sprites, Greenlawn, Dusk.” Art League of Long Island, August-September 2024.
“Presidential Portrait, #45” Benefit for Harris/Walz, Gallery Gaia, Brooklyn, NY, August 3 - August 31, 2024.
“The Essentialists,” 3rd Annual Member & Guest Group Show, Pictor Gallery, Manhattan, NY - November 28 - December 23, 2023.
“the real, honest goodness,” Small Works Exhibit. Jag Gallery. Key West, FL. November 3 - November 26 2023.
Beyond Earth. Ten Moir Gallery. Kansas City, MO. September 2023.
Art and Poetic Text. Cultural Center of Cape Cod. South Yarmouth, MA. April 11-29, 2023.
"One Need Not Be a Chamber," Down on Paper. Vestige Concept Gallery. Pittsburgh, PA. February 18 - March 19, 2023.
"Hain't," New Data--New Dada. Stone Valley Arts. Poultney, VT. September 16 - October 23, 2022.
After the End of the End of the World. Regier Gallery, Bethel College. North Newton, KS. February - March 2021.
"Voyager Postscripts", Creative Climate Awards/Human Impacts Institute. Manhattan. Nov 6 - Dec 4, 2019.
Collage. Site: Brooklyn Gallery. Brooklyn. June 14 - July 13, 2019.