Terence Gower

From the Second World War onwards, the United States government embarked on an ambitious embassy-building program. From Iraq to Cuba and South Vietnam to Canada, modern architecture was deployed as a vehicle to project American state power and cultural heft in a world then, as now, riven by great power rivalry and rising antihegemonic forces. Designed by paragons of modernism, these new embassies were meant to present a humanist and open-minded image of US power.

Curated by Adelina Vlas and Frances Loeffler at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, “Terence Gower: Embassy” provided a seductive yet critical reflection upon this project and the creative powers it mobilized. Gower’s work joins “In Search of Expo 67” (Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal), 2017, and similar attempts by contemporary artists to query the troubling undertones latent within our fascination with high modernism’s beautiful objects and utopian ideals. Why did so many of us find the Mad Men so alluring? Don’t we know better?

Exhibited within a single gallery, “Terence Gower: Embassy” presents four case studies from this epoch: Baghdad, Havana, Saigon and Ottawa, each represented by a three-dimensional installation and a series of archival documentation. Harrison + Abramovitz’s US embassy in Havana, Cuba, 1953, offers an early example of this modernist embassy-building program. Gower focuses upon its “Mussolini-style” balcony facing Havana Bay, which he represents through a space frame delineating the balcony’s concrete parapet. It is paired with reproductions of newspapers from the Cuban Revolution that chart an unstable narrative replete with several fictional elements.

Josep Lluís Sert’s US embassy in Baghdad, 1957, was designed as a modernist response to Iraq’s climate and interpretation of its traditional forms. Gower has re-created one panel from an elaborate roof screen that Sert designed to shade the building. At The Power Plant this is hung vertically. This rotation from the panel’s original orientation removes it from the world of performative simulation (Gower is not creating “mock-ups”) so as to allow visitors to appreciate its geometric pattern. Drawings and a model of Sert’s embassy are paired with television footage from the run-up to the 2003 US-led invasion. As is often the case in “Embassy,” Gower’s own stance is ambivalent. Is the juxtaposition meant to contrast two very different manifestations of American power, or to link them in a single interventionist lineage?

Perhaps the most famous image of a postwar American embassy is that of the helicopter evacuation of the one in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as the city fell to North Vietnamese forces in 1975. Designed in 1965 by Curtis + Davis, a New Orleans firm known for its progressive prison designs, the embassy compound featured a breeze block wall, meant to provide protection in response to the bombing of the previous embassy building. Artfully inserted into the gallery (it is bisected by an existing column), Gower’s representation of the breeze block illustrated the banal ubiquity of many modern materials, in contrast to the sculptural seductiveness of Sert’s roof screen panel. Two tables, one on either side of the wall, present opposing communist and Western narratives about the Vietnam War; the viewer may choose how to weigh them against each other.

Many of these installations were first commissioned for exhibitions elsewhere on the global art circuit (Seoul, Berlin, etc.). By exhibiting them in Toronto, Vlas and Loeffler have allowed central Canadian audiences to appreciate the work of a significant Canadian artist. They have also brought to the fore the elephant in almost every Canadian room: Is Canada an independent country or a puppet whose strings are pulled by Washington? This is a personal obsession of Gower’s; the artist frequently highlights the presence of CIA staff within embassy contingents. To delve deeper into the CIA’s malign influence upon Canadian politics and culture, Gower stages a fake documentary in which he responds to questions posed by an interviewer.

Gower’s mother, Rosalie Gower, was a CRTC commissioner involved in setting rules for Canadian content in broadcast media, and his father, Terry Gower, was an architect. “Embassy” has blossomed at the intersection of his parents’ careers. Canada also offers “Embassy”’s most fascinating case study: Gower’s projective wireframe reconstruction of Harold Spitznagel’s unbuilt US embassy in Ottawa, 1958. Few documents exist to tell us what this long-forgotten scheme would have looked like, a gap in the historical record that provides a sparkling opportunity for Gower to substitute one building for another. Spitznagel’s visitor centre at Mount Rushmore features in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller North by Northwest. Gower projects its fictionalized representation— its clean, modernist lines imbued both the American patriotism and Hitchcockian psychodrama— back upon Canada’s capital city.

Gower has described “Embassy” as an example of what the artist himself terms “wild scholarship.” As such, it loosely belongs to what Hal Foster has called art’s “archival turn” and Claire Bishop has labelled “research-based art.” However, Gower avoids many of the pitfalls critiqued by Bishop. The exhibition does not overwhelm its visitors with heaps of information materialized in myriad forms. It neither dictates any one conclusion nor forswears the possibility of reaching one. Instead, what is truly powerful in Gower’s exhibition is his (seeming) ambivalence. Equally relevant as a work of historical research and as a lens through which present reality can be grasped, Gower’s elegant work deftly balances nostalgia for utopian ideals with an ethical imperative to explore and explode myths. ❚

“Terence Gower: Embassy” was exhibited at The Power Plant, Toronto, from May 3, 2024, to August 11, 2024.

Peter Sealy is an architectural historian at the University of Toronto, where he directs the undergraduate architectural studies program.