Cris Worley Fine Arts is proud to announce our first solo-exhibition with Sherry Owens entitled Tied to This World, opening with an artist’s reception on Saturday, September 7th from 6:00 to 9:00pm. Despite her longstanding career as one of Texas’ most significant sculptors, this landmark exhibition will be the artist’s first solo exhibition at a Dallas gallery in 20 years. In the title, Owens chooses to refer to This world and not The world, underscoring her belief that other worlds may exist beyond our own—that we are a small part of a much larger complex of life-possibilities yet inextricably bound to our host.
Deeply passionate about the health and fragility of planet Earth, Sherry Owens has chosen to communicate her message through the use of the sinewy crepe myrtle tree, a local material she has carved and composed for over 30 years. Each work endeavored is based in narrative—a story of potential, as in the work Abandoned Fields Adust, or mythology, as in works like Embrace of Heaven and Earth and The Other Saturn. Guardians, an imposing diptych of two larger-than-life “figures” formed with blood-hued and charred limbs are for Owens “protectors of the earth, [they are] spirit guides into the known and unknown.” Many of these recent works, though initially composed in crepe myrtle, are cast in bronze. The exhibition features both wood and bronze sculptures along with prints and drawings.
Sherry Owens lives and works in Dallas, TX and received a BFA from Southern Methodist University. Her work has been shown throughout Texas and the southwest; in 2018, she completed a two-person site specific installation at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum in Austin, Texas, and was included in Commanding Space: Women Sculptors of Texas, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. In 2017, Owens mounted a solo exhibition at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, and the Martin Museum of Art at Baylor University. Owens has exhibited internationally in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, India, Peru, Turkey, and was recently included in The First Crosscurrent Yokohama-Texas International Artists Exchange Show 2019 at Kanagawa Prefectural Gallery in Yokohama, Japan.
Sherry Owens has completed several large public art projects, including a large-scale bronze through the Love Field Modernization Program at Love Field Airport in Dallas, TX and a monumental commission for the Ben E. Keith Company, also in Dallas. Owens is a former president of the Texas Sculpture Association, has served on various art boards and was a co-founder of the Emergency Artists’ Support League. She was the recipient of the Moss/Chumley North Texas Artist Award in 1999, was the West Texas Triangle artist in 2010 with a comprehensive survey at five west Texas museums, and received the Artist/Craftsman Award from the AIA Dallas in 2014.