This two part aluminum sculpture was commissioned for the exhibition Terence Gower: Public Spirit at the Hirhhorn Museum in Washington, DC. The installation was built around the story of Hirshhorn, Ontario, an ideal town planned but never built in the Canadian wilderness. The two sculptures that make up Private Enterprise / Public Spirit are 1:10 scale models of the two principal buildings of the town: the office tower to be built for Hirshhorn’s mining company and the public museum to house the Hirshhorn art collection. Depending on a viewer’s impressions of the exhibition and research, the open frame structures of the sculpture could represent the buildings under construction, beacons of a shining technological future, or alternately, two skeletal ruins left by some destructive event.

Documentation: Installation photos from Terence Gower: Public Spirit at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2009; installed outdoors at a private collection, 2011

Terence Gower, 2008

Aluminum

Two elements: 300 x 90 x 180 cm and 65 x 220 x 120 cm

Related Project: Public Spirit

Related Work: Wilderness Utopia