Introduction

Scott Rothkopf: Laura Owens is an artist who's based in Los Angeles, where she's lived since the early 1990's. 

Narrator: Scott Rothkopf is the Deputy Director for Programs, and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, and organized this exhibition. 

Scott Rothkopf: Since that time she's been, I think, one of the most important figures in discussions around contemporary painting, and art more generally. She's had this remarkable approach to making work that seems big, ambitious, abstract, intellectual on the one hand, and also extremely personal, funny, witty, involved with pop culture, music, cartooning, things that you wouldn't necessarily associate with advanced art. The way that she's brought these two strands together, to me, is one of the key aspects of what's made her such a challenging and relevant artist today. 

We started thinking about the exhibition as a series of four discrete cabins or rooms that people could move in and out of. Each of these galleries is a kind of free-floating space that almost acts like a portal in time. Then you leave those galleries, and you're back in the space of the Whitney today. And this play with time and place, with art and architecture, with the notion of the past and the present colliding in the work was something that we really wanted to bring forward in this exhibition.