Heather Rowe

About

Featuring a site-specific ceiling installation and two freestanding sculptures, Rowe explores how the activation of pre-existing spatial nuances through the presence of form can convey a narrative. Third Girl refers to the title of an Agatha Christie novel, a mystery plot with a quintessential triangle of suspects whose ambiguous relationships slowly come into focus as the culprit of the crime is revealed.

Playing off the idiosyncrasies of the exhibition space, a semi-transparent curved curtain splits the room without forming a barrier. The first freestanding sculpture comprised of hinged wooden frames supporting shards of mirror and glass creates complex facets in which reflections are oblique or obscured. The frames jut out of the sculpture’s core and become mechanisms for reflective containment. More anthropomorphic in nature than abstract, the sculpture explores ideas of framing and light. A second freestanding sculpture alludes to a rotating mechanism and employs a concealed mirror shard on a moveable hinge that absurdly attempts to penetrate the wall.

This is the first time Rowe creates freestanding sculptures where the object and support structure become one. They complement and contrast her earlier works – wall mirrors constructed of glass shards, wood, and reclaimed frames which insist on personal negotiations with reflection and desire, and immersive installations that reference architecture and cinema.  Here, the sculptures are of human scale and the physical detachment from the wall suggest a self-contained presence, with their mirrored components folding the reflections inward to an elusive center rather than outward.

Third Girl is a response to the intimacy and particularities of the small project space: the biomorphic plaster column, the curves of the wall, indents in the sheetrock and rough brick wall – all features generally absent from a whitebox gallery space. The semi-transparent curtain suspended from a sinuous metallic rod both reveals and conceals these idiosyncrasies. While an original project conceived for the location, Rowe goes beyond the idea of site specificity and pushes her sculptural work to develop an intimate dialogue with the architectural surroundings; where the space itself becomes a character in the story.

Rowe’s solo exhibitions include commissions for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana and UMMA/University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including shows at PS1/MoMA, Long Island City, New York; Art in General, New York; White Columns, New York; the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; and in 2008 her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial. She has had several solo exhibitions at D’Amelio Terras and in 2014presented a solo project with James Cohan Gallery.  Currently, she is part of a group show “Performing the Grid” at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. She works in Brooklyn.