The Power Plant is thrilled to present Terence Gower Embassy, the largest survey of the New York-based artist to date and his first in Canada since 1993. Gower, who has lived and worked internationally for many years, employs a range of media to investigate postwar material and intellectual histories, particularly as they connect to art and architecture.
Terence Gower: Embassy will feature over a decade-worth of work stemming from his investigation into the diplomatic architecture of the United States. Four multi-part installations form a larger study of American embassy buildings that have played important roles in recent international events in Baghdad, Havana, Saigon, and Ottawa. These expansive artistic constellations, including archival documents, sculptures, videos, and works on paper, are the outcome of the artist's extensive research process.
Gower considers the exhibition itself as an embassy sent from the past, from a formative period in US history where much of the current geopolitical landscape was formed. Considering the urgencies and uncertainties of our current moment, Terence Gower: Embassy asks how we might work with history to better understand the present.
The artist would like to acknowledge Canada Council for the Arts for its support of the new work The Lost Embassy, 2024.
Press release courtesy The Power Plant.
Baghdad CS 1: United States Embassy, Baghdad (1960). Josep Lluis Sert Papers, Graduate School of Design Archives, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.