Amanda Rowan / Fine Art / Digital Film / Place Setting Short Film

Highly performative, Rowan’s work tells timeless stories of domesticity through a cinematic lens. Within the film Place Setting, she plays a solitary housewife who creates and destroys a glamorous 1970s-style dinner party through retro gestures. The film is a sculptural and performance piece that is at once a celebration of matriarchy and the art and flair of the hostess; while simultaneously eluding to collective generational trauma through its deconstruction. With a reverence for the camp, and unafraid to laugh, Rowan is in on the joke of female representation. She is seducing you to engage with the works because this post-modern Renaissance artist knows sexuality, humor, and beauty in images, ultimately opening up a dialogue to something deeper. The Place Setting film and photographs take the notion of the forgotten and exploited females of the past, and the iconography associated with them, as a way to respond to contemporary mores– asking in what ways is depicting and performing the feminine a constraint and in what ways is it power?

Specifications

6 minute short film, Place Setting

Open Edition 

 

Details

An immersion into the exquisite tactility of housekeeping finds expression and rebellion. 

 

Created during Amanda Rowan’s Fellowship at the Women’s International Study Center at Acequia Madre House in April 2021 – her visually arresting new exhibition, Place Setting, is a multimedia performance piece of photography, film, and sculpture.

Rowan examined, interpreted, and took inspiration from the extensive archive of personal artifacts of Eva Scott Fényes, Leonora S.M. Curtin and Leonora F.C. Paloheimo – who left behind an extraordinary record of their times in letters, journals, publications, albums, photographs, art, and artifacts.

The result of the project is an arresting collection of work – including recreated elaborate dinner parties from archival recipe books – which explores the surrealist narrative of domestic labor as well as themes of property and independence linked to the trappings of class and gender.

 

Schedule
Exhibition at Poet and/the Bench

• Tuesday, October 3, 5:30-7:30 pm, Opening with Live Installation
• Saturday, October 7, 2:30-5:30 pm, Tea with Amanda
• Ongoing, Place Setting, Ritual and Dramatic Landscapes photo series on view

Place Setting premiers at the 46th Mill Valley Film Festival

• Monday, October 9, at 8:00 pm at the Rafael 3 
• Tuesday, October 10, at 2:00 pm at the Rafael 3

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Los Angeles, CA

Amanda Rowan graduated Cum Laude from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. A successful tenure followed in New York City shooting celebrities and acting, including performances on Broadway, in Law and Order, the Chappelle Show, and co-starring with Paris Hilton in National Lampoon's Pledge This. Amanda's images hang in the permanent collection at The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas with Damien Hirst, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, and Takashi Murakami. She now lives in Los Angeles, working within the genres of photography and performance art and as full-time faculty at the Photo Arts Conservatory at the New York Film Academy Los Angeles in both the MFA and BFA programs.

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