Owl

Catalina Duarte is known for her distinctive, amorphous designs, found on brewery and gallery walls, apparel, and even live models. She began this path at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, when a professor encouraged her to experiment with lines and mark-making. “After destroying yards of mixed-media paper, I stumbled into a language that I didn’t fully understood but could speak,” she says. “This style to me is interpreted more as a visual language more than anything.” She adopted the moniker “Owl” a few years back. Duarte says working under this name allows her connect with viewers via her work, “not my body or face.” It allows control over her expression, letting these winding, writhing collections of lines tell her story. “Owl is simply just a translator between worlds I constantly juggle,” she maintains. And the artist’s door design in the Boileryard playfully comments on the function of the makeshift canvas itself. She sees her door as an entrance into “endless possibilities of imagination and innovation that this community and space has a potential for,” she says. “I hope people see it as see a portal for what Charlotte has to offer.”

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