Rowan Renee “That Day, We Looked Happy”

FiveMyles

poster for Rowan Renee “That Day, We Looked Happy”
[Image: Rowan Renee "My Father at Unknown Gravesite in 2016" (2021) Archival photo on fused glass, 6 x 8 in.]

This event has ended.

Ten years ago the artist’s father passed away in prison. Renee’s family was not given the opportunity to visit him as his health declined. The interruption of the grieving process caused by the carceral system amplified other losses that came before his incarceration, flanked by intergenerational trauma and family secrets. For years afterward, Renee felt like there was no ritual that could hold this complex grief.

That Day, We Looked Happy is an immersive installation that envisions artistic labor as a vehicle for transforming loss that exceeds our limits. It draws from an archive of photos and documents Rowan Renee inherited after their father’s death. At the center of the installation is a hand-woven enclosure built around the footprint of a 6ft x 8ft prison cell. The translucent linen and wool mesh is printed with fragments of correspondence and other documents that fade in and out of legibility. Along the walls of the gallery hangs a collection of family photos, broken and reconfigured on fused-glass.

For Renee art making became a way to process grief through the body. The aching shoulders from hours spent on the loom, the cuts from handling sharp glass, the way the materials Renee worked with engaged and resisted their touch gave the artist a place to contain the tension between absence and excess. At a moment of widespread loss the artist hopes this work can help us imagine new possibilities for personal and collective healing - possibilities that hold space for complex, and interrupted, experiences of grief.

Rowan Renee explores how queer identity is mediated by the law, addressing the intergenerational impact of gender-based violence and incarceration through State records and family archives. Their work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Pioneer Works (2015) and the Aperture Foundation (2017), and they have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Harpo Foundation and the Jerome Hill Foundation. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood at MoMA PS1.

Media

Schedule

from April 24, 2021 to May 30, 2021

Opening Reception on 2021-04-24 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Rowan Renee

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