INGENIO
CAMERON ROWLAND, 2023
At first glance, this looks like a huge rusted wok. Or a spaceship part. Or something a guy in Red Hook swears he's gonna turn into a fire pit. It does not look precious. Because the second something looks "sculptural," people relax. This is not that. This is a 19th-century sugar kettle. Made in England. Used in Louisiana. Not a symbol of the sugar trade. Not a poetic reference to it. An actual piece of the machine. The title — Ingenio — means sugar mill. The engine. Which is bleak, because that's exactly how the whole thing worked: land, metal, heat, cane, money, human beings — all fed into one system and processed like the brutality was just a technical detail. Sugar has incredible PR now. Sugar is cupcakes. Sugar is a tiny spoon. Sugar is your aunt asking if you want one lump or two. This drags it back to what it was: industry. Extraction. A business so violent it could make a bowl feel sinister. And look at the size of this thing. Over seven feet across. That matters because it stops reading like an old object and starts reading like infrastructure. Like — oh right. This wasn't some side note in history. This was a whole apparatus. Big enough to organize labor, punishment, profit, and death around itself. Rowland doesn't give you a tasteful meditation on injustice. He brings in the hardware. The leftover parts. The legal parts. The metal parts. The parts everybody would rather call historical because "ongoing" is a little too stressful. Like the Attica desk in the other gallery — if you saw that — Rowland's works aren't purchased by the museums that show them. They're leased. The institution can display the object. It cannot own it. Because ownership — who had it, who profited from it, who gets to claim it now — is the question the work keeps asking. And now it's here. Clean floor. White wall. Beautiful lighting. Still built for what it was built for. The world that used this object is gone. The logic that made it? Little harder to get rid of.