Untitled, 1998

Jorge Pardo: You and I decided to do an exhibition together. You made the paintings about the birds and the bees, I made beds. It was an eccentric, kind of dopey collaboration between two people who were going out.

Narrator: While working on the oral history for this exhibition’s catalog, Owens interviewed Pardo about this work.

Scott Rothkopf: Artistic communities and collaboration have always been important to Owens and the way that she approaches her work. Sometimes she's made paintings with a friend. Other times she's curated exhibitions of their art, and sometimes they've curated exhibitions with her. In this case you see a gallery that evokes a show that Owens had in 1999 with the artist Jorge Pardo, who was at the time her boyfriend and also living in Los Angeles.

Jorge Pardo: You were making images of nature that were pretty straight up. I saw this as an extension of that. I always like your work because it grounds itself in something very eccentrically site-specific, like a bedroom set.

I thought the work was interesting because it was very eccentric, personal, intimate notion was driving the relationship between these two things. And then these other relationships they sort of reverberated with other things; there were these other relationships. It’s a sappy thing to say, but it was kind of a nice image of love or something.