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Maggie Owsley
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I work with the smallest artifacts of modern life - what slips through pockets, gutters, and memory.
Broken zipper pulls, lone playing cards, twisted rubber bands, string, scraps of plastic ephemera. These objects are not just trash, they are cultural residue, emotional runoff, the material of the mundane.
My process is rooted in patternicity, a term coined by science writer Michael Shermer, the tendency to find meaning in noise. I curate that noise. Through installation and photography, I construct new systems of attention, inviting viewers to see what we’re taught to overlook. In the margins of consumer culture, I find quiet arrangements of loss/lost, habit, humor, and harm.
As in my compost-based work, I treat waste as signal, not accident. What we discard holds stories. What we ignore reveals the architecture of our time.