Rowan Renee Solo Exhibition

On view through August 6, 2022

Free artist walk­through event August 6, 2022

KODA is pleased to announce a solo exhi­bi­tion of artist Rowan Renee, tak­ing place at KODA House on Gov­er­nors Island, Colonels Row Build­ing 404B.

The No Spir­it For Me series (2019) will be pre­sent­ed along with self por­traits from Bod­ies of Woodseries (2016).

Rowan Renee (b. 1985, West Palm Beach, Flori­da) is a gen­derqueer artist cur­rent­ly work­ing in Brook­lyn, NY. Their work address­es inter­gen­er­a­tional trau­ma, gen­der-based vio­lence and the impact of the crim­i­nal legal sys­tem through image, text and instal­la­tion. ​“In 2018, I acquired the con­tents of my father’s crim­i­nal case file from the Flori­da State Attor­ney who pros­e­cut­ed him. The file includ­ed the offi­cial records used to con­demn my father – court records, wit­ness state­ments and police evi­dence pho­tographs. Through these doc­u­ments, I was able to track how the jus­tice process failed in a case that the State hailed as an exam­ple of jus­tice served. Using lith­o­g­ra­phy, weav­ing and met­al­work, I re-pre­sent­ed over 1,000 pages of these records as ​“hang­ing files” in a fic­ti­tious police evi­dence room. The repet­i­tive motions of print­ing 1,000 pages through an etch­ing press, of trac­ing the shapes of redac­tion on the loom, of weld­ing dozens of steel joints was a method to use my body – the site of vio­lence – as a vehi­cle for jus­tice.” — Rowan Renee about No Spir­it For Me series (2019).

Rowan Renee has exhib­it­ed in solo exhi­bi­tions at Smack Mel­lon (2021), Five Myles (2021), Aper­ture Foun­da­tion (2017), and Pio­neer Works (2015), with reviews in pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing VICE, Huff­in­g­ton Post, Hyper­al­ler­gic, and The New York Times. They have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foun­da­tion, the Har­po Foun­da­tion and the Jerome Hill Foun­da­tion, and have been an Artist-in-Res­i­dence at the Cen­ter for Book Arts, NARS Foun­da­tion, Red Bull Arts and the Tex­tile Arts Cen­ter. In 2022, they will be the sec­ond Artist-in-Res­i­dence at Green-Wood Ceme­tery in Brook­lyn, NY. Cur­rent­ly, their project Between the Lines, sup­port­ed by We, Women Pho­to, runs art work­shops by cor­re­spon­dence with LGBTQ+ peo­ple cur­rent­ly incar­cer­at­ed in Flori­da. Their instal­la­tion, No Spir­it For Me (2019), was includ­ed in the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed exhi­bi­tion Mark­ing Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incar­cer­a­tion, curat­ed by Dr. Nicole R. Fleet­wood at MoMA PS1.