Commemorating eleven consecutive years of collaboration, the Aspen Art Museum (AAM) and Aspen Skiing Company (ASC) announce an edition of eleven images by Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Laura Owens to appear on the 2016–17 ski season lift tickets. Her depictions of lemons raining from the sky, a reoccurring motif within Owens’s work, are simultaneously reminiscent of Pop Art silkscreen prints and seventies illustrations.
As part of the AAM and ASC’s longstanding Art in Unexpected Places partnership, the new artwork will debut on November 24, opening day for the 2016-17 season. Tickets with last year’s artwork are on sale now. Known for paintings often depicting borrowed motifs, as well as limited-edition, handmade books, Owens has taken direct pictorial references from a book series she produced in 2015—featuring appropriated imagery and texts from spam emails—for the lift tickets.
Owens’s practice blurs representation and abstraction, drawing extensively from a wide variety of art historical sources—from Chinese landscape painting and the work of European painters like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, to Color Field painting and Pop Art. Owens combines the grid and the gesture, balancing stenciled or screen-printed images with hand-painted marks.
For the past eleven years, ASC/AAM collaborative lift ticket commissions have been produced by such internationally important artists as Yutaka Sone, Peter Doig, Karen Kilimnik, Jim Hodges, Carla Klein, Mamma Andersson, Mark Grotjahn, David Shrigley, Mark Bradford, Anne Collier, and last year, Takashi Murakami. In addition to the lift tickets, the ASC and AAM have collaborated on the installation of on-mountain projects by Sone and Grotjahn, as well as artists Patterson Beckwith, Teresita Fernández, Dave Muller, 2010 Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz, Lars Ø. Ramberg, 1995 Turner Prize winner Mark Wallinger, and Jennifer West.
Photo-based works by artist Walter Niedermayr are also installed throughout ASC properties at all four Aspen-area mountains’ ticket offices, restaurants, hospitality divisions The Little Nell and the Limelight Hotel Aspen, and at ASC-partner Colorado Ski Country USA’s Denver location.
New York–based artist Shinique Smith’s site-specific installation, Resonant Tides (2015), is on view at Elk Camp on Snowmass Mountain throughout the 2016–17 winter season. Smith incorporates an array of visual sources within her practice, from graffiti and Japanese calligraphy to fashion, dance, and Abstract Expressionism, to address cultural and social issues around production, consumption, surplus, and waste. In addition, Smith explores the values we ascribe to objects both discarded and prized while she investigates the notion of belonging.
The AAM and ASC: Art in Unexpected Places
Art in Unexpected Places II chronicles the AAM and ASC’s unique, award-winning partnership from 2012–2016, which vividly explores the evolution of the ongoing public art collaboration that sets Aspen apart as a unique cultural/recreational destination.
Art in Unexpected Places II includes artist commentary, artist interviews, essays, and conversations between prominent philanthropist and art collector Paula Crown and artist David Muller, Mike Kaplan, President and CEO of ASC, and artist David Shrigley, and AAM Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director Heidi Zuckerman and Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler.
