Like Panes of Glass explores the memorial construct of the modern family as an ideal and a reality.  Having grown up in the Midwest during the 1970s and 1980s in a family of five, I experienced “The American Dream” in all its idyllic glory. Loving, kind, supportive parents, a sister and a brother, a dog and multitudes of hamsters, really, who could ask for more?  Over the years I have watched my perfect family and the perfect families of my friends crack and fade into the dysfunctional state of the contemporary American family. How did this happen to us? Watch Libby Rowe’s artist talk here

The images, though drawn from my family albums, represent the idealized mode of the perfect family. Framed by the platonic shapes of domestic items, the images are trimmed and curated to conceal or delete imperfections, manufacturing an ideal family unit. Parts of the memories informed by the photographs are conveniently shaved away.

The stencils are all drawn from objects that are purchasable; the products both denote the wholesomeness of family life and connote social and financial status. 

Not only do you have a grill, but you have the perfect grill.  The implication that having the right collection of products will align you with the best of your neighbors also acts to construct your identity, albeit the empty, previously-digested identity of the consumer. The stencils objectify the false sense of domestic normalcy: neither the memory nor the present can possibly conform to an ideal without fracturing.