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With the art market a dominant behemoth tromping around in our ongoing cultural life, Cameron Rowland’s visually chilly, deceptively simple installation, “D37,” assumes an expanded resonance. The work is also about buying and selling, but the merchandise here is not traditional canvas, paint or brightly polished steel.
No, these salable goods are flesh and blood. Bicycles, a grandfather clock, a baby stroller and a couple of backpack leaf blowers are what you will see in a pristine white gallery at the Museum of Contemporary Art, where the show is on view. Those everyday objects stand in for people — human beings objectified.
The legacy of chattel slavery, which is often submerged, is the subject of “D37.” Rowland links America’s slave history to current experience.
Its history begins with the earliest European settlements and ends with the Civil War, but the legacy of the nation’s infamous “peculiar institution” lives on. Like any institution, it intersects with all manner of ordinary and un-peculiar things, which we encounter unwittingly on a daily basis. Rowland’s sharp focus makes the invisible visible.
Take the grandfather clock over in the gallery’s corner — a stately, late-18th century English timepiece of no particular aesthetic note but that once belonged to a grand South Carolina plantation. The loud chime of clocks like this one became a resonant sound that helped organize and regulate daily life, including forced work-details on the estate. Rowland’s choice of a specifically British grandfather clock establishes a subtle but trenchant familial link to the mother country, principal market for the exports of cotton and tobacco on which the South relied.
Demand meets supply, however cruelly produced, as...