This web­site is an on­line archive of the work of Ter­ence Gower, a vi­sual artist based in New York City. The Pro­jects archive can be searched two ways: By Medium and by Year. A small se­lec­tion of work from the 1990s is also doc­u­mented on this site. Each Pro­ject page fea­tures a short state­ment, doc­u­men­ta­tion, and links to se­lected texts and on­line sources re­lated to the work. Ter­ence Gower is rep­re­sented by LA­BOR, Mex­ico City  and can be con­tacted at tg@​ter​ence​gowe​r.​com. This web­site was de­signed by Nora Cristea.
STATE­MENT
I work on a num­ber of bod­ies of work at once, each de­vel­oped over sev­eral years. In the past decade my work has fo­cused on a crit­i­cal re-read­ing of the mod­ern move­ment and its utopian bent. A de­sire to re­ex­am­ine the no­tion of progress—a term cor­rupted by the ex­cesses of tech­no­log­i­cal mod­ernism—has fu­eled my re­search on the post-war pe­riod and has led to a search for mod­els from the past that might still be rel­e­vant to­day.
I have done ex­ten­sive work about mod­ern ar­chi­tec­ture in Mex­ico, the United States and Canada. I am es­pe­cially in­ter­ested in the ques­tion of how build­ings sig­nify be­yond their func­tion: How do em­bassy build­ings rep­re­sent democ­racy (a ques­tion I ex­plore in Bagh­dad Case Study); how do pub­lic hous­ing com­plexes rep­re­sent gov­ern­ment ac­tivism (the sub­ject of the in­stal­la­tions Grand En­sem­ble and Tlatelol­cona); or how does the vo­cab­u­lary of func­tion­al­ism rep­re­sent the no­tion of progress (Poly­tech­nic and Func­tion­al­ism).
I am in­ter­ested in how non-rep­re­sen­ta­tional forms can con­vey mean­ing. Ab­stract forms can com­mu­ni­cate ab­stract ideas more ef­fec­tively than rep­re­sen­ta­tional or pic­to­r­ial forms, and ab­stract art can be a po­lit­i­cal medium. My re­cent work on ab­stract art (Dis­play Mod­ern [Hep­worth], Noguchi Galaxy) com­pli­ments my ear­lier re­search on ar­chi­tec­tural form.
I work in many me­dia, in­clud­ing video, sculp­ture, draw­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, and ar­chi­tec­ture. My re­cent pro­jects can be thought of as cu­ra­to­r­ial in­stal­la­tions. I am of­ten in­vited to do read­ings of col­lec­tions and archives and the re­sult­ing pro­jects com­bine video, sculp­ture, and archival ma­te­r­ial in large mu­seum in­stal­la­tions (Pub­lic Spirit at the Hir­sh­horn Mu­seum, Dis­play Na­ture at Gävle Kon­st­cen­trum). This process has also led to in­vi­ta­tions from mu­se­ums to cre­ate an ar­chi­tec­tural con­text for large group ex­hi­bi­tions with the goal of com­mu­ni­cat­ing the cu­ra­tor’s the­sis through the form of the ex­hi­bi­tion.
BI­OG­RA­PHY