Courtesy the artist and Sticky Pictures, New York

Terence Gower, still from "Hirshhorn, Ontario: A Modern Utopia in the Wilderness of Canada" (2008). High-definition digital video, 2 hrs 30 mins.

   November 2008 Field Guide

William Eggleston

Anton Kannemeyer

The Brussels Dream

Lynne Marsh

Frances Stark

Donald Rodney

Oranges and Sardines

Renzo Martens

Dóra Maurer

Munio Weinraub and Amos Gitai

Sharon Lockhart

Stephan Balkenhol

Jacques Bedel

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In the mid-1950s, the entrepreneur Joseph Hirshhorn enlisted Philip Johnson to design a utopian “town of culture” in the Canadian wilderness of Ontario, where Hirshhorn owned massive uranium mines. The new city was to achieve a harmonious balance between labor and leisure, providing miners with housing and a museum, sculpture park, theater, concert hall, and library. Unlike other privately funded industry-specific towns, it would have had a unique focus on arts and culture, access to advances in psychological therapies, and a highly aestheticized design throughout. The project never came to fruition, but documentation of Johnson’s models and plans remain. Taking this forgotten historical footnote as his subject, New York–based Canadian artist Terence Gower, whose works often focus on detecting shifts in ideology through architecture, presents “Public Spirit—the Hirshhorn Project.” The multimedia installation incorporates photographs of the original maquettes, new models of Johnson’s design created by Gower, and a digitally animated video projection, which leads visitors through the imagined town. Gower likens the planned town and its likewise utopian predecessors to “little quasi-socialist planets within a capitalist universe.”

"Terence Gower" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.