Terence Gower

Overview
Terence Gower, Gruen in Tehran, 2018 (Detail)
Terence Gower, Gruen in Tehran, 2018 (Detail)
Terence Gower works in many media including video, sculpture, drawing, installation, sound, and full-scale architectural constructions. He works on a number of bodies of work concurrently, each in research and production for several years. For his installations the artist often appropriates period photography, narrative and documentary film, archival material, and historical artifacts.
 
For example, the artist’s ongoing Case Study (Embassy) series, begun in 2012, is a related group of commissions by museums and biennials in the US, Europe, and Asia that examines the postwar US embassy construction program. The artist demonstrates how the architecture of each embassy complex operates as both a functional and symbolic instrument of US Cold War foreign policy, often in ideological opposition to its international setting.
 

Terence Gower is a Canadian artist working in New York, Mexico City, and France. The artist’s solo museum exhibition Embassy will open at Power Plant in Toronto in February, 2024.

 

In 2023, Gower presented two related architectural interventions; at Phillip Johnson’s Glass House (New Canaan, CT), and at Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, both using installation and musical performance to examine the social and acoustical characteristics of each site. His most recent public commissions are the monumental concrete sculpture group Six Formes for Region Rhône-Alpes, France, Noguchi Galaxy for the New York School Construction Authority, the temporary outdoor pavilion SuperPuesto for the Bronx Museum of Art, Workshop Pavilion for MUSAC, León (Spain), as well as two context-specific architectural interventions in Oaxaca, Mexico and Bali, Indonesia.

 

Recent solo shows have taken place at Americas Society, and Simon Preston Gallery, New York; The Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL; Galería Labor and El Eco, Mexico City; Monte Clark Gallery, Vancouver; Neubauer Collegium, Chicago, and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC. Recent group exhibitions include the XIII Bienal de la Habana, Cuba; 12th Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Pacific Standard Time, LA; as well as group shows at Galerie Lelong, New Museum, and MoMA PS1, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Witte de With, Rotterdam; MACBA, CCCB, and Centro de Arte Santa Mónica, Barcelona; Tensta Konsthal, Stockholm; Museo Jumex and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; CAPC, Bordeaux; Institut d'art contemporain Villeurbanne, Lyon; and Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester. Gower has been granted research fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, Smithsonian Institution, Canada Council for the Arts, Graham Foundation, Gothenburg University, and New York State Council on the Arts.

 

In addition to many articles and interviews, four monographs have been published on Gower’s work: Terence Gower: El Marge, Havana Case Study, Display Architecture: Terence Gower Pavilions, Ciudad Moderna: Terence Gower Videos, and two are forthcoming: Embassy, and Form, Model, Syntax, Display. The artist has been invited to curate and design exhibitions for CAPC, Bordeaux; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; ICA, Philadelphia; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; and the New Museum, New York (Modern Shorts, a film program that later toured to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles and the Rotterdam Architecture Film Festival.)

Exhibitions