The Power Plant

Terence Gower is a Canadian artist who lives and works in New York City and France. He typically works on a number of bodies of work concurrently in a variety of media: video, sculpture, drawing, and installation. Gower often displays his research material as part of his installations, allowing viewers to follow the process that leads to the sculptures and videos that are based on this research. The artist’s main field of research has been in post-war culture in the Americas, Europe and the Middle East, demonstrating how abstract architectural and sculptural forms come to represent the cultures and ideologies of their era. As Gower has observed of his work, “A desire to reexamine the notion of progress—a term corrupted by the excesses of technological modernism—runs through my practice.”

Gower will discuss a work in progress about the history of US-Cuba relations. A new US embassy building was completed in Havana in 1953, then closed eight years later when the US and Cuba ceased diplomatic relations. The building then went into service as a propaganda tool by both sides, until diplomatic relations were restored last year. This history will be explored by Gower as he discusses his research on the Havana embassy and relates this new project to earlier works of his that touch on the ideological function of architecture.