Terence Gower

LINK to the website of the artist.

_{^{Stills from LOST EMBASSY by Terence Gower / Exibition}}

BORDERCROSSINGS (January, 2025) – Terence Gower

Text by Peter Sealy

From the Second World War onwards, the United States government embarked on an
ambitious embassy-building program. From Iraq to Cuba and South Vietnam to Canada, modern architecture was deployed as a vehicle to project American state power and cultural heft in a world then, as now, riven by great power rivalry and rising antihegemonic forces. Designed by paragons of modernism, these new embassies were meant to present a humanist and open-minded image of US power.
Curated by Adelina Vlas and Frances Loeffler at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, “Terence Gower: Embassy” provided a seductive yet critical reflection upon this project and the creative powers it mobilized. Gower’s work joins “In Search of Expo 67” (Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal), 2017, and similar attempts by contemporary artists to query the troubling undertones latent within our fascination with high modernism’s beautiful objects and utopian ideals. Why did so many of us find
the Mad Men so alluring? Don’t we know better?
Exhibited within a single gallery, “Terence Gower: Embassy” presents four case studies from this epoch: Baghdad, Havana, Saigon and Ottawa, each represented by a threedimensional installation and a series of archival documentation.[…]
Gower has described “Embassy” as an example of what the artist himself terms “wild scholarship.” As such, it loosely belongs to what Hal Foster has called art’s “archival turn” and Claire Bishop has labelled “research-based art.” However, Gower avoids many of the pitfalls critiqued by Bishop. The exhibition does not overwhelm its visitors with heaps of information materialized in myriad forms. It neither dictates any one conclusion nor forswears the possibility of reaching one. Instead, what is truly powerful
in Gower’s exhibition is his (seeming) ambivalence. Equally relevant as a work of historical research and as a lens through which present reality can be grasped, Gower’s elegant work deftly balances nostalgia for utopian ideals with an ethical imperative to explore and explode myths.

“Terence Gower: Embassy” was exhibited at The Power Plant, Toronto, from May 3, 2024, to August 11, 2024.

^{Peter Sealy is an architectural historian at the University of Toronto, where he directs the undergraduate architectural studies program.}

^{Stills from NEW UTOPIAS by Terence Gower}

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