Roewan Crowe
artist | writer | professor
writing, making & teaching in and thru collapse. intense queer biophillic desire, lover of all species. energized by wild acts of imagination and radical transformation.
artist | writer | professor
writing, making & teaching in and thru collapse. intense queer biophillic desire, lover of all species. energized by wild acts of imagination and radical transformation.
My Monument
MY MONUMENT is a multimedia exhibition featuring artistic exchanges among artists cam bush, Steven Leyden Cochrane, Roewan Crowe, and Paul Robles using Crowe’s new book Quivering Land as a point of connection to explore monuments and vanished feminist/queer/alternative cultural sites. The double-sited exhibit will be shown in Gallery 1C03 (1st floor, Centennial Hall) and in the Hamilton Galleria (4th floor mezzanine, Centennial Hall in the Library), both at The University of Winnipeg.
Quivering Land is a queerish Western long poem that engages with politics to reckon with the legacies of violence and colonization in the West. Robles creates intricately cut origami paper images in response to this narrative, while Crowe produces text-based works that have been altered irrevocably by the brutality of the gun. Together the artists fashion a collaborative sculpture which further elucidates shared experiences of loss and the desire to create space for reflection and memory.
MY MONUMENT includes the participatory website which maps vanished feminist/queer/alternative bookstores and solicits stories, images, and experiences of these bookstores through a public call for submissions. Evidence of this interactive and intergenerational shared space will take the form of multimedia installations by Steven Leyden Cochrane in Gallery 1C03 and by cam bush in the Hamilton Galleria. All four MY MONUMENT artists will join with Chandra Mayor in front of the former site of Bold Print – The Women’s Bookstore on 478 River Avenue on March 15 in an event titled Ghost Launch to reanimate that location with public readings and the launch of a chapbook. Similarly, for The Book is Happening, Crowe will deliver a durational public reading of Quivering Land in the queer space of Gallery 1C03 on March 20.
While completing her manuscript Quivering Land, Roewan approached Paul Robles to create images in response to her book (published by ARP Books in November 2013). Quivering Land is a queerish Western that engages with poetics and politics to reckon with the legacies of violence and colonization in the West. Both Crowe and Robles share a desire to understand the West, Hollywood Westerns, and different forms of masculinities. They have both explored these themes in previous work. Their collaboration, focused on the text and images in Quivering Land, revealed that they also shared experiences of loss and being lost, fathers, and familiars. Through their conversations they came to understand that they both saw their art as creating spaces for reflection and memory. In MY MONUMENT they worked to deepen these connections by engaging in material explorations of their shared experiences and feelings. They individually exhibit images and text pieces, as well as a collaborative sculptural desert piece.