Exploded diagrams speak to us on a deep level, but Melody Owen has taken that appreciation and run with it. Tonight at Curiosity Club she'll share some of her incredible collection of cutaway imagery and ideas about why we're attracted to them. She is also posting a cutaway a day until she runs out on her Tumblr Cutaway World! 

Talk starts 6pm PST at Hand-Eye Supply and streams on the Curiosity Club homepage!

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"For over twenty years, I have been collecting cutaways. These are illustrations (most often found in Encyclopedias, medical books and text books) which depict the surface of a building, machine, animal, plant, or human—cut away— to reveal the insides. I have hundreds of these images and will show a selection of them while talking about why they interest me. It has something to do with how we perceive reality. Something to do with surfaces and systems that we cannot see or touch, but which pervade our lives. All the mysteries around us and inside us. How things tick. What makes my fingers move to type. Where is that spark of soul located inside the eye?"

"I was a small child, crouching over a swampy pond, watching tadpoles. enormous, soon to be frogs, they swarmed around the bank. Through the thin membrane covering their distended bellies, the tangle of intestines was clearly visible. Heavy with the process of transformation, sluggish, they provoked one to reach for them. Pulled out onto shore with a stick, touched carelessly, the swollen bellies burst. the contents leaked out in a confusion of knots. Soon they were beset by flies. I sat there, my heart beating fast, shaken by what happened. the destruction of soft life and the boundless mystery of the content of softness. It was just the same as confronting a broken stem with sap flowing out, provoked by an inexplicable inner process, a force only apparently understood. the never fully explored mystery of the interior, soft and perishable." ~ Magdalena Abakanowicz

Melody Owen is an artist/writer/person based in Portland, Oregon. She is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery and has also shown work at The Portland Art Museum, Core Sample, Modern Zoo, PDX Gallery, Nine at Blue Sky, The Nines, The Art Gym, PICA, TBA, PDX Experimental Film Festival, and elsewhere out in the world. She has travelled to artist residencies in Iceland, Paris, Quebec, Switzerland, Eastern Oregon and Western New York, and published books with Publication Studio, Future Tense, Scout Books and Container Corps.