D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present our third solo exhibition with Heather Rowe. Rowe’s art occupies a space at the intersection of sculpture, installation, and architecture and her constructions derive their tension from a refusal to fit neatly into any one category. For this exhibition, Rowe will reconfigure a large-scale installation, “Trouble Everyday,” realized this past October for her solo show at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, organized by Jacob Proctor. The installation uses metal and wood supports which take cues from scaffolding to prop up hovering slices of floor and ceiling. Upon entering the threshold of the gallery, the work is an abstract construction of geometric lines and shapes. However, once immersed within the piece, the banal details of domestic spaces reveal themselves. They indicate the bare bones of a space—one that can either be gutted and renovated or occupied and personalized.

“There is a quasi-cinematic aspect to Rowe’s recent work. In many ways, one does not so much look at it as look into it. Hovering in the gallery at roughly eye level, Trouble Everyday presents the viewer with slice of space in which vision is alternately focused and frustrated, attracted by decorative details and deflected by angled shards of mirror that shatter and redirect our vision in a series of spatial jump cuts. As the viewer moves through and around the work, features and motifs appear and repeat, here rotated, there inverted. These formal echoes create an intimation of narrative but stubbornly refuse to cohere into anything so straightforward as a story. Instead, what emerges again and again is Rowe’s keen understanding of how cinematic mise-en-scène—the precise arrangement and movement not only of actors but also of sets, props, costumes, et cetera—contributes to the psychological charge of a given scene.”

–Jacob Proctor, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art

Heather Rowe is currently exhibiting a large-scale installation at The Indianapolis Museum of Art. She was recently featured in the group exhibition Between Spaces at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, New York and was a participant in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.