For the Santa Monica Museum of Art Sandra Rowe executed The Invisible Woman (1993), a large, ambitious installation, which hinted at the quality of a woman’s life who has a family and works as an unskilled laborer: Various areas of the installation dealt with the routine and tedium of a short order cook, the long waits for public transportation, and the limitations and even the poetics of the home space. The piece occupied 2,500 square feet, with constructed rooms around the edge, a large green mock lunch counter in the center, as well as ramps, walkways, and red waiting benches. There we large scale photographs, audio, and video components. The piece constructed the life of an unknown woman simply through the spaces she occupied. The woman was never shown except once, obliquely. One had the feeling that her life was so fleeting, that she was here and then gone, and that one’s own life can be filled by unconscious encounters with countless “invisible” people.

This listing is the catalogue for that very exhibition.