SkiCo, Aspen Art Museum unveil Laura Owens-designed lift tickets

Commemorating 11 years of their “Art in Unexpected Places” collaboration, the Aspen Art Museum and Aspen Skiing Co. on Wednesday announced an edition of 11 images by Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Laura Owens that will appear on the 2016–17 ski season lift tickets.

Owens’ depictions of lemons raining from the sky, a reoccurring motif in her work, are simultaneously reminiscent of Pop Art silkscreen prints and 1970s illustrations.

The new artwork will be printed on passes starting Nov. 24, Aspen’s opening day for the 2016-17 season. Tickets with last year’s artwork are on sale now.

Known for paintings often depicting borrowed motifs as well as limited-edition handmade books, Owens has taken direct pictorial references from a book series she produced in 2015 — featuring appropriated imagery and texts from spam emails — for the lift tickets. Owens’s practice blurs representation and abstraction, drawing extensively from a wide variety of art historical sources.

Owens follows artists including Yutaka Sone, Jim Hodges, Anne Collier and Takashi Murakami in designing Aspen lift tickets.

Shinique Smith’s site-specific installation “Resonant Tides,” which opened last winter at the Elk Camp restaurant on Snowmass, will remain on view through the winter season.

Skico and the art museum also are releasing the boon “Art in Unexpected Places II” this winter. It chronicles the partnership from 2012 through 2016 and follows a 2011 book that that covered its first five years. The book includes artist commentary, interviews, essays and conversations between Skico execs, artists and a Q&A between museum director Heidi Zuckerman and Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler.