Increasingly, material objects have become the vehicles for intangible aesthetic and symbolic messages. Few artists provoke meaning from existing products with such emotional verve and sincerity as Cameron Rowland. The underlying concepts—shadow economies, social injustices, racial inequalities—are almost invisible, but they are also very present, understood through a combined visceral, textual and emotional effort.
Born in 1988 in Philadelphia, Rowland graduated from Wesleyan University with a degree in studio art before working in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s architecture collection and then with architecture firms in Copenhagen and in New York, where his artistic practice is now based. Rowland trained his eye early on history’s brutality and bias. Deal Tray (2013), exhibited in a group show at the now defunct Bed-Stuy Love Affair (one of his first exhibitions), depicts the metal dish located below the bulletproof window where money exchanges hands between patron and bank teller. A similar approach is found in Pass-Thru (2013), the protective partition and revolving tray used by 24-hour bodegas and liquor stores as an added security measure through which to pass cash and purchased items. Both sculptures address the movement of goods and contact between unequal people, unequal because this resistance to spending often occurs in locations where it would prove to be most effective. In a gallery, the expressively mute pieces serve as physical evidence of an everyday social inequity that escapes most viewers in their daily existence until confronted by this art. The objects are informed by the socio-economic and political environment within which they are created. As Rowland suggests, the patterns that emerge seem hardly coincidental. 
Neither are the artifacts he selects. Each comes with an unhidden agenda. “Bait, Inc,” Rowland’s first solo show from 2014 at Essex Street gallery, demonstrated the disparities found lurking beneath scavenged copper pipes and car parts that form illicit aftermarkets outside the gallery. His latest exhibition, “91020000,” at Artists Space earlier this year, led onlookers deep into the American criminal justice debate. The pieces may have at first seemed unfamiliar (aluminum manhole cover extension rings) and mundane (wooden benches, a pair of firefighter’s jackets). But nearly all objects on view were produced by cheap inmate labor paid at rates as low as ten cents per hour. 
The show’s title is the customer registration number assigned to Artists Space in order to purchase commodities for the exhibit from Corcraft, the market name for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, Division of Industries, which sells incarcerated-made goods through government agencies and certain nonprofits (through which Artists Space qualified). This implicates the exhibit in the exploitative system that it critiques but as a means to direct our attention to it while simultaneously raising the intellectual bar. Rowland’s work serves as a powerful counterpoint to much art produced today that refuses to acknowledge the artist’s own implication in economies of use—and misuse. The collection of objects on view as sculptures is punctured with extensive footnotes—rigorously researched by the artist—and presented in a 12-page brochure examining how the carceral labor complex continues the economic legacy of slavery. These brute physical facts conjure the racial and economic imbalance of imprisonment reinforced by, as the artist writes, “the advent of laws designed to criminalize black life” that have “aligned the status of the ex-slave and the pre-criminal.” This exacting exhibit—reopened in June as “Indirect Benefit” at Fri-Art, Centre d’Art de Fribourg in Switzerland—limns the political valence found in his minimalist though deeply charged works. 
Bait, Inc, 2014.Hidden Truth: Cameron Rowland
Hidden Truth: Cameron Rowland
From security partitions to prison-made benches, emergent artist Cameron Rowland reveals the darker economic and political context of everyday objects.
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