Place Setting by Amanda Rowan

Exhibition Dates :
* October 3 – December 31

Join Poet and the Bench for the West Coast Premier of multimedia artist Amanda Rowan’s provocative Place Setting and Ritual self-portrait images and still lifes in conjunction with her short film Place Setting; the latter was selected for inclusion in the 46th Mill Valley Film Festival in October.

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.

“Unquestionably maximalist, Rowan’s “Ritual” pieces are styled with a collector’s eye.”

Raised in Mill Valley, this is Amanda’s return to her hometown with a narrative of the moment.

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?