Untitled, 1997 is but one chocolate in the box of chocolates that is Laura Owens’ skill set.

Her work has a tendency to be, well, anything: “gestural and color-field abstraction, digital imaging, American folk art, Japanese landscape, children’s-book illustration, dropped shadows, greeting-card whimsy, clip art, wallpaper design, silk screen, tapestry, typography, stencils, recorded-sound elements, and mechanical moving parts,"...to name a few.

The first striking thing about this work is that it seems like it could adapt to whatever context it is put in. A list of possibilities are as follows:

1. With the addition of an inspirational quote in the middle of the piece explaining that saltwater in the form of sweat, tears, or the ocean is the cure to everything, it could hang in a junior high schooler’s bedroom.

2. A joke about seagulls flying over the bay being called bay-gulls could be added and it could be in a book of jokes.

3. One could easily see it fitting nicely as the month of June picture in your mom’s kitchen calendar.

4. It could be the backdrop for a school production of Titanic: The Musical or an episode of Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno, a series of PG rated short films about the mating rituals of animals. These options are especially fitting because of the shadows cast by the seagulls, giving it a homemade production vibe, even if this is an optical illusions.

5. Lastly, it could hang on the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

At the end of the day, we know that this piece belongs in a fine establishment like the Whitney, but it never hurts to dream.