Voltz Clarke Gallery

As a plea of obsessive love for family and the natural world, “Kidnapped on a Sunny Day” offers an affective installation of paintings, poetry, and video enveloped in draped fabric. It displays an optimistic world of happy Black families living in harmony with nature, while the recited poem recounts Owens’ childhood abduction by her German grandmother to prevent her mixed-race family from moving to America. The disjunction between what is seen and heard stages the artist’s ongoing reckoning with familial displacement, racial difference, and estrangement from the natural world.