Brent Owens

Savage Wonder Tribeca presents Fancy Feast, an exhibition by Brent Owens that explores food as a medium for critiquing culture, class, and social mores. Inspired by the "gourmet" branding of the cat food line introduced in 1992, Owens utilizes subtle cynicism and meticulously crafted wooden sculptures to examine the complexities of modern societal standards.

The exhibition's centerpiece is a 24-foot banquet table heaped with "faux victuals," including oversized blueberries and oysters, a massive toasted marshmallow, and a seven-foot deli sandwich that will be cut into individual servings throughout the show. Other works, such as sculptures of inordinately large, molding white bread, serve as metaphors for social inequity and ask, "Who has a seat at the table?"

Owens' skeptical humor is further highlighted in his "neon" works. These wooden sculptures mimic neon signage but remain intentionally non-electric—a sardonic double entendre on the nature of the medium itself. Though they include electrical cords to destabilize the viewer's perception, they cannot be illuminated. In Fancy Feast, bright red wooden letters spell out the namesake of the exhibition without illumination, while the dangling electric cord serves as a punchline: a reminder of neon's context and of where the work deliberately "falls short" of its true luminous magic.

Another striking work is a sarcophagus-shaped portable ice chest titled It's Cool Until It's Not. Filled with real ice and beverages, the piece features "strigilated" lines typical of Roman sarcophagi from 200–300 AD, a pattern based on the skin scrapers of Roman athletes. While these lines reference leisure and the beverages of idle hours, the ice chest is also moribund—a kind of memento mori. In Owens' world, reality is disrupted, leaving the viewer caught between laughter and apprehension, joy and darkness, hilarity and suffering.

Brent Owens lives and works in Marbletown, NY. The sibling of a Marine Corps veteran, Brent's artwork is conceived as an "Anthropocene Blues"—a simultaneous lament and embrace of humanity's relationship with the natural world. After obtaining a BFA in Sculpture fromWinthrop University, Owens spent nearly two decades in New York City working in the studios of artists such as Tom Sachs, Piotr Uklański, and Ursula von Rydingsvard. Owens' work has been exhibited widely both domestically and internationally. In 2023, he was awarded the National Academy of Design's Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

Founded in 2021 as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Savage Wonder is a multidisciplinary arts organization based in Beacon, NY, with a contemporary art gallery in Tribeca, NYC. Dedicated to artists forged in military and first responder service, Savage Wonder’s mission is to advance American performing and visual arts by developing and producing exceptional multidisciplinary work by veterans, first responders, and their immediate family members. Its vision is to reimagine the live arts experience, frequently uniting performance, visual art, and hospitality into a singular live encounter rooted in the absurd.