Terence Gower | 1971

Next week a project I’ve been working on for the last couple of months opens at the Power Plant. They are celebrating their 25th anniversary with a show of materials from the archive, and I was invited to come and make an intervention of sorts, for the second half of the show, which opens on the 29th. One of the two elements of my ‘response’ is a sequenced collection of polaroids found in the dusty bankers boxes of their long and narrow archive room. The images show artworks being packed and unpacked and were presumably taken for insurance purposes or to assist with re-crating. They were clearly never meant to be seen, but there’s something satisfying about artworks half-covered in bubble wrap, lying flat on linoleum floors and in the backs of moving vans.

The six images below are not going to be used in the exhibition, but they feature an excellent multiple that I’ve wanted to include here for ages, but Art Metropole’s tiny thumbnail wouldn’t do it justice, and no other pics were available online.

Self-published in 1997, the work exists as a beautifully boxed collection of acrylic identification tags for fictitious artworks. The details listed (artist's names, titles, measurements and materials) form a portrait of the art world in the early seventies, with such genres as conceptualism, pop art, abstract expressionism, performance art, interventions, land art, and minimalism all represented.

Examples include :

Pat Pierson
Land Cavity (Oval), 1971
Intervention, (Black and white photograph: 20" x 24")

Roger Terry
8 1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper suggesting nothing..., 1971
Paper, 8 1/2" x 11"

I think it could make an excellent exhibition unto itself and it's always been high on my wish list. Here it is being unwrapped and assessed for damage:










Terence Gower
1971
New York City, USA: Self-published, 1997
24.5 x 15.5 x 7.5 cm. 

Printed acrylic wall mountable identification tags, foil-stamped box
Edition of 8 signed and numbered copies.

Available here, for $ 800.00 CDN.