CPM is pleased to announce the opening of its new gallery space in Baltimore, Maryland with an exhibition of new works by Clifford Owens, titled Skully. CPM was created by the artist and gallerist Vlad Smolkin in 2018 as an exhibition space in Chinatown, NYC. We are honored to start this next stage of programming with Clifford Owens, whose first show with CPM will mark a kind of homecoming for both him and Smolkin, who each grew up in Baltimore. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, November 7, from 11am - 8pm at 1512 Bolton St, Baltimore, MD 21217. (* Due to safety concerns, the show will be scheduled by appointment only throughout the day. To schedule an appointment please email: info@cpmprogram.com

Skully is a children’s street game played on the asphalt and sidewalks of American cities, popular between the 1950s - 1980’s. The skully board is a 6ft by 6ft square drawn in chalk on the street, with 12 smaller boxes drawn along the perimeter and a 13th box (the “skull”) drawn in the center of the board. The game pieces are made with bottle caps, typically filled with tar or wax to weigh them down for easy gliding on the street. The objective is to flick your cap to all of the number squares in sequence and ending up in the “skull”, while also striking your opponents caps off of the field of play. Each player took great pride in the fashioning and retooling of their pieces—the weight, the color, the choice of caps, and the materials sourced to weigh them down.

In this exhibition, Owens uses his own recollections of this game, which he played as a child on the corner of Sanford Place and Division Street in Baltimore, as a source and framework for the performance and execution of a new suite of approximately 30 works on paper. In the Skully suite, Owens starts by creating his own game pieces, jamming a mound of graphite putty into milk bottle caps, and using them as mark making devices that slide across the surface of the 30 x 20 inch sheets of paper. When the action drawing is complete, the bottle caps themselves are adhered to the surface of the paper.

When playing skully, the city creates the conditions and context for the game. By removing the game from the street to the studio, Owens heightens and complicates notions of condition, agency, and circumstance. In these works there is a different kind of game being played—between confirming and confronting modernist aesthetics. These drawings are alluding to the material and process driven investigations of mid 20th century formalism, while at the same time using specific socio-political referents as a foundation and driving force behind the abstract language being explored.

The exhibition will also have a series of photogram pieces. In these works, Owens reaches into a pouch containing unexposed photo paper with his hand holding a small flashlight, making movements across the paper, and feeling but not seeing the surface that will ultimately record the punctures, creases, and gestures of the light. Owens then hand prints and develops the individual sheets in a darkroom. The resulting ghostly images show glimpses of the artist’s hand as if dipping in and out of a pool of water or through a cloud.

There will be one new sculptural work in the show titled A Dollar Short, in which a roll of 49 dollar-bills are each individually gold leafed and bound together. This piece also uses Owens’ childhood in Baltimore as a source; alluding to a memory of covering a wad of one-dollar bills with a larger denomination. The use of gold leaf in this case further complicates the relationships between perception and value. Owens’ hand is present in all of the works in this show, as a character, a performer, and a means to an end. In each case, there is a balancing between giving up and taking control—between will and circumstance.

Clifford Owens (b. 1971, Baltimore, MD) received a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (1998), an MFA from Rutgers University (2000), and completed the Whitney Independent Study Program (2001). Owens makes photographs, videos, performances, paper-works, installations, and texts. Solo museum exhibitions include: “Anthology” at the Museum of Modern Art PS1, “Better the Rebel You Know” at Home in Manchester, England, and “Perspectives 173: Clifford Owens” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art,” “Greater New York 2005,” “Freestyle,” and “Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century.” His on-going, performance-based projects have been widely presented in museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Owens was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. Public collections include the Baltimore Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY.