Terence Gower and Lucien Durey: TWO ROOMS
to
Monte Clark Gallery 53 Dunlevy Avenue, Vancouver, British Columbia V6A 3A3

Terence Gower, "Not Free Association (Guitarras)," 2016
7 hollow wooden wall sculptures fabricated from layered wood veneers, approx 59" x 7" x 3" each
Opening reception: Thursday November 22, 6pm to 8pm
Performance by Lucien Durey: Thursday November 22, 6:30pm
Monte Clark gallery is pleased to announce two parallel solo exhibitions by artists Terence Gower and Lucien Durey, which both present two bodies of their work exhibited in respective side-by-side gallery spaces. Both artists are interested in the influence and subsequent internalization of our built environment, exploring how it shapes our intellectual and emotional engagement with the world. In the first room of each exhibition will be research based projects that address architected, exterior landscapes. The second room looks within through projects that approach their materiality as absorbed memory, realized in subconscious expression. This exhibition project is guest curated by Lee Plested and will be accompanied by an exhibition document with a curatorial essay.
TWO ROOMS sees the return of Terence Gower to Monte Clark Gallery where he presented his first commercial solo exhibition, Contracts and Endorsements, in 1993, a show that examined legal and marketing phenomena in the art world. Since that time, Gower has sharpened his conceptual approach in a decades-long study of the socioeconomics of cold war architecture and urbanism, employing a prodigious sculptural aesthetic. Gower’s research program is driven by a search for progressive models within postwar modernism, and results in works that often repurpose 20th century art history, including its forms and its failures. With a sophisticated engagement with minimalism, language-based practices, and appropriation, the artist produces sensual objects that speak of our shared political past. This exhibition will feature a new project about architect and urbanist Victor Gruen’s masterplan for Tehran, as well as a sculpture series based on the Freudian technique of free association, produced in dialogue with Tehran-based psychoanalyst.
Terence Gower is based in New York City and Burgundy, France. His most recent commissions are the monumental concrete sculpture group Six Formes for Region Rhône-Alpes, France, and SuperPuesto for the Bronx Museum, a temporary outdoor pavilion used for museum and community events. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Simon Preston, New York; Labor and El Eco, Mexico City; and Neubauer Collegium, Chicago. Terence’s work has also recently been included in group exhibitions including the 12th Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Pacific Standard Time, LA; as well as shows at the National Gallery of Canada; Witte de With, Rotterdam; MACBA, Barcelona; Tensta Konsthal, Stockholm; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; CAPC, Bordeaux; Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, Lyon; Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester; and the Cranbrook Museum, outside Detroit. He is represented by Galería LABOR in Mexico City

Lucien Durey, "Saguaro," 2017
glass, steel, brass, paint, rope, 36" x 24" Courtesy of the artist and Monte Clark Gallery
TWO ROOMS also brings the work of Lucien Durey to the gallery for his commercial debut. Durey’s engagement with history finds its nexus in his personal world, accumulating diaristic evidence in an examination of various found objects and what properties they keep in reserve, cataloguing them into constellations of associations, meditating on how they shape our daily modes or define our range of experiences through their use. Deeply influenced by ‘Thing Theory’, Durey works through an artistic understanding of his quotidian landscape to evolve objects that speak of the collective conditions of consumptive reification and looks for possible fissures within these cycles of desire for stirring resonances. The first gallery will present mobiles and monochromes composed of found glass, the second features a surrealist assortment of sculptural manifestations evolved from resonate objects. A suite of songs, composed with these works, will be performed by Durey and his sister, Bess, during opening reception.
Lucien Durey authored the year-long bimonthly review column “Vancouver Report,” published in 2017–18 by Canadian Art. Recent exhibitions include Phenomenal Hosts, Neutral Ground, Regina (2018); Paraphernalia, Burrard Arts Foundation, Vancouver (2018); Eternal Return, Richmond Art Gallery (2017); HOTDOG CAR WASH, Campbell River Art Gallery (2017); and Swimming Pool Blue, Achterhaus, Hamburg (2016). He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MFA from Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts.