Heather Rowe - The Indianapolis Star. February 26, 2010. Pg. 8.

Heather Rowe

The Indianapolis Star. February 26, 2010. Pg. 8.

 

Heather Rowe hopes visitors to her "Tenuous Arrangements" installation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art move around the piece with a sense of discovery and revisit it. - Photo provided by the Indianapolis Museum of Art

By Mary Lee Pappas / Star correspondent

February 26, 2010

Indianapolis Star

Working with rough plywood, mirror shards and other architectural substructure discards, Brooklyn-based artist Heather Rowe has created a grouping of harmonious, airy and clean-edged narrow niches that link repetitively and rhythmically.

At 14 feet high and about 40 feet long, "Tenuous Arrangements" is the largest and first in-the-round piece Rowe has imagined, thanks to the challenge of creating work for the vast space inside the Indianapolis Museum of Art's Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion.

The site-specific sculpture is the latest in a series of commissioned installations for the pavilion made possible by a $2.5 million grant from the Efroymson Family Fund, which was established in 2007.

"I was struck by the glass, the frames and the windows," said Rowe, 39, about the pavilion. "So I started thinking about a piece that had a lot to do with those elements."

Living up to its title, "Tenuous Arrangements" complements the interior, but skews it comfortably enough that upon entering the museum visitors will experience discord from the obstructed sense of space confronting them.

They can walk through her sculpture as well, but not touch. Though immobile, the illusion of movement exists. "It has a kind of threshold . . . there's actually an entrance in a sense, but it's at an angle, so you have to find it," said Rowe.

She wants visitors to approach, revisit and move around her piece with discovery.

"It asks a bit of the viewer. How do you remember spaces? What's the psychological relationship to space around us? I'm hoping it pulls those thoughts."

Three subtle color schemes -- lavender, blue and yellow -- inspired by Robert Altman's 1977 film "Three Women," are meant to represent different moods or characters mirroring the film's dreamy sentiment.

"I feel like I was really getting into the colors and tones," Rowe said. "I used to be a painter, so I feel like that was coming back in this piece more. I use color for very specific associations, but this became more of a painterly investigation."

Allison Unruh, assistant curator of contemporary art at the IMA, is excited about how visitors will interact and negotiate the work.

"It's something that has a real physical immediacy that can draw people in, but it's also so conceptually sophisticated that it works on this whole other level.

"The psychological resonances that her work evokes . . . strong feelings, strong memories through these everyday materials that people overlook all the time is something we take for granted, but the context she puts them in gives them a new sense of life."

Her website - http://heatherrowestudio.com/about

Tenuous Arrangements - http://heatherrowestudio.com/#/tenuous-arrangements/

Heather Rowe, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Newfields, Efroymson Family Entrance Pavilion, IMA, sculpture, contemporary art, Allison Unrah, Robert Altman ,Three Women, Brooklyn, New York, Tenuous arrangements 

Eiteljorg showcases historic pistols

 By Mary Lee Pappas / Star correspondent

Posted: February 12, 2010

President John F. Kennedy's initials are etched in the Colt New Frontier revolver engraved by Alvin A. White. - Photo provided by Eiteljorg Museum

Annie Oakley's steel, mother-of-pearl and gold revolver by Smith & Wesson is a 44-caliber handgun from the late 19th century. - Photo provided by Eiteljorg Museum

James H. Nottage, vice president and chief curatorial officer at the Eiteljorg Museum, has a history with some of the nearly 60 historic, one-of-a-kind firearms on display in a new exhibit at the museum.

"Pistols: Dazzling Firearms," a 5,000-square-foot exhibition featuring guns from the 1840s to present day, was assembled and is on loan from the Autry National Center in Los Angeles. Nottage was the center's first chief curator.

While at the Autry Center, Nottage acquired many of the pieces in "Pistols" from the Colt company collection, so he knows them intimately. But he stresses that the pieces are mostly about artistry.

"Technically they could be fired, but most of them have never been fired," said Nottage. "So it's really a platform for symbolism and ideas."

"If you think of paintings as being oil on canvas usually, you can think of these as steel canvases," he said about the intricate and lavish embellishments made to the pieces that render them more decadent than deadly. "They're engraved with chisels and hammers, inlaid with gold, platinum, silver. Grips are made from a range of materials -- rosewood to ivory to pearl to silver to gold. You can look at these pieces in terms of seeing how design motifs and techniques changed over time."

Several of the pieces were done by Tiffany from the 1860s to the present -- an art form of the privileged class, according to Nottage. There's also work by famed early 20th-century engravers such as Alvin White.

"Going back hundreds of years, firearms were expensive technology. Crowned heads of Europe and German principalities . . . sometimes had private gunsmiths," said Nottage. "The mechanism was expensive and the embellishment went along with that."

From Hollywoodto politics, varied aspects of American history are examined through the pistols, some owned and used by Western icons like James William Butler known as Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, George Custer and others.

"There are also presentation pieces done for Hollywood cowboys like Gene Autry, Tom Mix and Buck Jones, a silent film star," he said.

Colt created firearms for Presidents John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and and Gerald Ford, whose guns can be seen in this show.

President Kennedy's New Frontier revolver has serial number PT109 after his Navy command boat, a solid gold inlaid PT boat and a presidential seal.

"Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson have their brands on the guns also. In Reagan's case, (it's) the California bear," said Nottage of the metalwork.

Eiteljorg Museum, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Autry National Center, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, James H. Nottage, historic guns, pistols, firearms