Missing Context Long Overdue
In 2024, artist and frequent collaborator Nancy Nowacek invited Rowe to consider sharing work created about the exhaustion and anxiety of pregnancy and early parenthood as a part of the exhibition Missing Context Long Overdue at Mana Contemporary, presented by the Monira Foundation.
As the curatorial statement for the show elaborates:
Artists Allison Rowe and Nancy Nowacek are tired. The artworks of “Missing Context Long Overdue” explore media portrayals of women and femme bodies and the artists' deeply intimate experiences with fatigue. Through their work, the artists provide some of the 'Missing Context' observed by scientists Alana M C Brown and Nicole J Gervais, who call for the advancement of sex-based sleep disorder identification and treatment approaches and whose work serves as inspiration for the show's title.
Women's and femme fatigue is supposed to be private. Our suffering is not given credence; rather, it is a state of gendered being that doesn’t warrant attention or empathy. Rowe and Nowacek make their private encounters with fatigue public through photos, monoprints, paintings, and videos.
Rowe's experiences of pregnancy inspired First Trimester (2018-2019), a series of text-based watercolors in which Rowe is trying to make sense of the host of unanticipated physical experiences emerging in early pregnancy, the most intense of which was fatigue. The birth of her daughter provoked a biological state of restless vigilance: from anxiety about her daughter surviving the minefield of warnings sewn into infant bedding (Soft Threats, 2019) to trying to build mathematical frameworks to optimize her daughter's rest every day—and thus her own—(Nap Math, 2019-2021). Mummy Reads the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report (2022) depitcts a new modality of caregiving fatigue: that of a mother attempting to examine the future world her child will inhabit while tending to her toddler in the present.