A Charlotte native, photographer Nick McOwen discovered his love for photography while touring around the eastern United States with the band Bubonik Funk. It is through the trial and error process of teaching himself and the experimental ethos garnered through creating music that he found his voice in photography. By warping and transforming colors in a style influenced by psychedelia and Surrealism, he attempts to present ordinary objects and scenery through a lens of curiosity. As society becomes more dependent on technology, he believes it is the artist’s duty to remind the viewer how the world can still be both beautiful and mysterious. He claims, “Taking that moment to allow yourself to be fascinated by the small instances when you’re drawn to something for no particular reason, I believe, maintains a youthful vigor vital to our collective sanity. I believe it adds perspective desperately needed in this rapidly evolving world.”

Artist’s Statement:
"I was in the throes of a deep romance with street photography, fixated on capturing the idiosyncrasies of city life around me when the reset button was pressed. Surrealism had been allowed too much mobility in my creative process and all the photos I took felt stale and derivative.

So, one cloudy day I decided to point the lens of my Ricoh GRii at the outstretched arms of the plants surrounding my apartment building on a whim, getting as close as the camera could focus. Maybe the air quality was particularly bad and I was groggier than usual, but something about the way they looked intrigued me. And even though I knew they were there, I didn’t know what they looked like until I sat down to view the photos on a large screen. Immediately I felt as if I was encapsulated by the leaves, overwhelmed by the perspective. To paraphrase Susan Sontag, I felt as if I had created a world to the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one I could conceive.

But this was not enough. If I was now at the second degree then I needed to find the third. False-color film reversal simulators...and then some. The Boxer incorporated 80’s glamour shot aesthetic in tandem with infrared processing. Others, such as Fiber Optics, used a combination of infrared processing over something that treated the plants to simulate the conditions of an indian summer. The images slowly began to take on forms beyond themselves. Dying leaves melted into spider webs while ornamental grasses began to look like optical fibers. It became, as I perceive it, the third degree. It is through these photos."

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