Beyond the Hedges (Slivered Gazebo)

Brooklyn-based sculptor Heather Rowe investigates the transitional space between architecture, sculpture, and installation through perspectival framing, formal inversion, and material deconstruction. Rowe’s latest work, Beyond the Hedges (Slivered Gazebo), is a site-specific installation of mirrors, corridors, and spatial slices presented at Socrates Sculpture Park; it is her first outdoor public artwork.

Beyond the Hedges (Slivered Gazebo) inverted the routine relationships we have with our surroundings by restructuring the familiar and reimagining architectural experiences. While many experience architecture in a state of distraction, Beyond the Hedges invited park visitors to focus beyond our current space.

For her project at Socrates, Rowe interpreted the traditional gazebo or trellis—structures typically placed within a park to frame picturesque views—as a sliced and cropped dimensional space that, sandwiched between pieces of plywood, becomes the framed view. Inspired by Peter Joel Harrison’s illustrated book Gazebos and Trellises, the plywood shapes suspended fragile moments of the garden pavilion, frozen in precarious states of decay or undoing. Complicating the internal network of latticework were mirrored insertions, offering an active relationship to the natural surrounds and Park visitors.

About the Artist

Heather Rowe is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York who received her MFA from Columbia University. She has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries including MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Galerie Zink, Berlin, Germany; D’Amelio Terras, New York; Michael Benevento Gallery, Los Angeles; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; White Columns, New York; and Artists Space, New York; and in 2008, her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial.