UMMA Projects: Heather Rowe December 23, 2009

Heather Rowe's art occupies a space at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, and installation, and her hybrid, fragmentary constructions derive their aesthetic frisson from their refusal to adhere to the norms of any one discipline. Although her works are often freestanding, Rowe's practice is keenly engaged with the formal language and phenomenological experience of architecture. Demanding to be experienced in real time and space, Rowe's installations work synergistically with their particular contexts to question the ways in which we experience different kinds of institutional and domestic environments and the humble materials out of which they are constructed. The sense that Rowe's work exists as neither wholly one thing nor another is heightened by her attention to transitional spaces: corridors, stud-walls, windows and doorways. Interior and exterior space seem to 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. For her UMMA Projects exhibition, Rowe has conceived of a single work that will occupy the whole of the Museum's Irving Stenn Jr. Family Project Gallery, responding in equal measure to the physical character of the space and to the sense of heightened visibility it engenders.