It would seem odd for me to pick out just one detail in Laura Owens’s show at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York this past spring, if only because the whole show was a convergence of details, a breathtaking accumulation of small and large flourishes, paint marks starting in paintings and spilling over to the walls and onto doors. Owens’s fondness for pastel and playful indifference to scale were everywhere too, in semi-domestic decorations, curlicues and repeated floral patterning that might be found on wallpaper borders of a 1960s American home. There were large-scale paintings hung against extravagant, layered wallpapers, and demure, pastel colour schemes giving way to lush palettes of jungle green and Day-Glo, tiny brush-tip details next to towering streaks of impasto. There was a desk at the entrance equipped with a press release that, when picked up, triggered a sensor to open a drawer full of artist’s books. As if turning a dollhouse into a giant stage set, Owens divided the gallery space into a smaller sequence of rooms, each contained by extravagantly painted walls. It reminded me of the doors in stage sets, where the whole backdrop is painted over the wall and the exit is a little cut-out that you don’t notice unless someone onstage pushes it open to duck out or transition to another scene. The doors allowing visitors to move from one room to the next were so easy to miss, hidden by being treated as part of the same massive canvas as the walls around them. I would have skipped a large part of the show, had another, bolder gallerygoer not pushed the first of these half-hidden doors open and led the way onwards into Owens’s successive sanctums within sanctums.

One part of the show did stand out. It had the disarming feel of the non-sequitur final sentence in an overwhelming novel, an afterthought that explains nothing but leaves you unsettled. You could’ve easily missed this moment in Owens’s show if you overlooked a door that opened to a final, small, darkened room the size of a broom cupboard. In this cramped space was a video work stationed at an awkwardly high spot. From below, the video became a blazing, distorted trapezoid of light. Watching it was like looking at a small window from a semi-subterranean dungeon cell. (My neck was reminded of a time in my thirties when I’d sit in extremely packed sports bars to watch the Boston Celtics make their way to the NBA playoffs.)

The odd positioning of the video was arresting, but so too were its subjects: a pair of crows. Hopping around on picnic tables and branches, the two crows – thanks to overdubbed human voices – chatted about every topic under the sun, from Ancient Greece to cat adoption. ‘Is it poo?’ one crow remarked, referring to a stain ostensibly on its clothes. ‘Probably just coffee’. At moments the topic turned to ‘Egypt and Rome and Sparta and Greece’, with one crow wondering, ‘Why were they all super sexist if they didn’t even communicate with each other?’  They spoke about Pompeii too: that residents of the doomed town had noticed smoke and ash, but continued about their lives as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

I was reminded of the avian characters in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966), which, thanks to voiceovers and subtitles, communicated their thoughts on everything from Marxist philosophy to Godly love. The crow in Pasolini’s film hopped alongside a pair of human protagonists and enjoyed cross-species conversations. By contrast, Owens’s crows are ensconced in their own world. But their musings felt so familiarly American to me. Or maybe Californian? Their voices place them somewhere suburban, somewhere where threats of something horrible lurking beyond a gully leave faint thumbprints on the edges of one’s subconscious, until one is distracted by that next Starbucks run. Their voices, and the things they consider, come from some place triangulated out of David Lynch, Vegas and Silicon Valley: some place where makeup tutorials alternate with images of humanitarian disaster, and serial killers coexist with shopping and gentle boredom. When the crows talk about Pompeii, one says, ‘They seemed like they were a lot less stressed than they should’ve been’. It could just as well be talking about our reaction to being in the midst of a full-blown climate crisis. Of course the conversation moves on to other topics. Do other kids smoke at school? One crow asks. The other says no, then reconsiders and adds that that they smoke in their cars. Later, one crow suggests making a plan to go hiking. ‘I’m tired’, the other says. ‘I want to sleep in’. At one point, the crows make a half-hearted plan to rob a Starbucks, wide-eyed by the prospect of getting not crumbs but an endless supply of cheese Danishes.

As it turns out, the voice actors providing the soundtrack for Crows (2025) were Owens and her daughter. I don’t know what to make of that fact, beyond loving it. You can hear a closeness in their voices, as they figure out how to think about the world, side by side. They talk with an ease that can’t be made up: an ease one finds between people who share a backstory of kindness that stretches so far back in time that it now goes unnoticed.