Thumbing through Phaidon Press’s most recent Vitamin publication, Vitamin 3D: New Perspectives on Sculpture and Installation, I was reminded of the work of Heather Rowe. I first encountered her work about a year ago on a visit to PS 1, on view was Between Spaces, a group exhibition featuring artists whose work extracts familiar objects from their typical functions and recontextualizes them in order to open up new possibilities and situations.
Heather Rowe: On Returning, 2007. Installation and detail views.
What draws me to Rowe’s work is her use of common construction materials to create a barebones domestic architecture. Within her minimal and open constructs a sense of interior and exterior is clearly defined both physically and psychologically. Shards of glass, worn wooden fixtures creep out of crevasses and behind wooden panels signaling this is not just any quotidian home space, but it is contains secrets, nostalgic at best and menacing at its worst. The structures become architectures of place memory.
The slicing and deconstruction of Rowe’s anonymous domestic spaces also gives nod to Gordon Matta-Clark’s splitting houses, leaving both interior and exteriors intact.
Heather Rowe: Something Crossed the Mind (embellished three times) 2008, Installation and detail views, 2008 Whitney Biennial.
Heather Rowe: Installation view, Between Spaces PS. 1, 2009. 
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