Through the Glass
Heather Rowe
Description
Subject Matter:
Heather Rowe's art sits precariously at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, and installation, and her hybrid, fragmentary constructions derive their aesthetic frisson from her (or their) refusal to adhere to the norms of any one discipline. The sense of the work as neither one thing nor another is heightened by an attention to transitional spaces: corridors, stud-walls, windows and doorways. Interior and exterior space collapse into one another as the raw materials of construction - modular units of drywall, lumber, glass, and metal - are combined with more decorative elements. Interstitial spaces reveal swatches of carpet or wallpaper, while shards of mirror incorporate the surrounding space in a fragmented patchwork of reflections.
Although keenly aware of such predecessors as Bruce Nauman's corridor installations, Robert Smithson's mirror displacements, and Gordon Matta-Clark's building cuts, Rowe's work combines formal and conceptual rigor with a psychological ambivalence and narrative tension in a manner both highly original and thoroughly contemporary.
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