The Window on Broad, the little showcase of installation art outside the University of the Arts’ Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, has always been a challenge. The reflections, the way the light hits the window, are fierce.
So any time an artist succeeds with the space, succeeds with making a piece that still works in spite of the reflections, I’m in awe.
Shannon Bowser has made something fairly simple. It’s a bunch of rocks with tales hurtling through window space in front of a blue background. The tales on the rock headed straight down quiver in an endearing manner, at once tender and comical. And a little machine labors and labors on the far right enhanced by a spring with an undefinable function.
The rock comets are touching, in their little blue cosmos; they are each of us traveling through space, our tales flaring behind us, wiggling with optimism and pleasure, ecstatic to exist. These rocks are ordinary looking, the crude matter of the universe. And over to the right, the laboring mechanism is God or the laws of nature or some sort of force playing out its power(lessness).
It’s a piece you can get in a basic sort of way very quickly as you walk down the street. But, like the night sky, it keeps calling you back.
