Women’s Order of Alchemy and Mysticism

Empty Set Project Space, Bronx, NY

September 7 - 30, 2020

This exhibition, Women’s Order of Alchemy and Mysticism remixes imagery primarily sourced from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Open Access images. Pivoting between sculptural shadow boxes, mixed media collages and a short film with music created by percussionist and composer Rohin Khemani, this installation engages with the artist’s desire to digitize and animate her analog collage work. Rowe’s re-imagined artworks, likely familiar to anyone with a peripheral knowledge of art history, invert the canonized narrative creating a place where women lose the humdrum trappings of duty and the male gaze vaporizes. This installation makes space for secret societies, the practice of magic in sacred spaces, and documentation of women sharpening their skills as oracles and keepers of esoteric knowledge. 

Rowe states, “I have created a syncretic sisterhood, removing women from their stasis of the picture frame and allowing them the freedom to explore mysticism and alchemy and learn from one other.”  Sacred geometries, elixirs, and talismans are central to the artists’ investigation. Rowe re-contextualizes the female subject from Petrus Christus’ work, A Goldsmith in his Shop, in which the subject is thought to be selecting her wedding ring . in an animated collage, the artist’s version places the female subject in a room from Pompeii where she casts spells and mixes elixirs. 

The viewer too is complicit in the artists’ subversive pact. Entering the space, the macro and micro toggle, one is either standing in the middle of a three dimensional composition encompassing the long narrow project space or peering into the diminutive shadow boxes, akin to exploring the many rooms off a long corridor.  

Rowe credits her Catholic school upbringing as inspiration for these artworks.  Surrounded by societies of religious orders and steeped in religious imagery, Rowe mines her past for memories of witnessing the inner and contemplative lives of women in sacred societies.