Think of art composed of sounds and you're almost sure to think of music. But Stephanie Rowden is interested in audible art that includes music but goes beyond it. The art of listening (and making art with sound) has always been, for Stephanie Rowden, connected with the realm of memory and the imagination. She is continually fascinated by the aural experience and how vividly we experience a sound of a place or thing despite its physical absence, conjuring such vivid imagery inside us.

Recently, Rowden came across a description about the nature of listening versus seeing that stopped her in her tracks: Seeing is light, which moves much faster than sound: 186,000 miles per second, as opposed to 1,088 feet per second. To listen, you must slow down and operate at the speed of sound rather than at the speed of light. In twenty years of making works with sound Rowden had never considered the medium in quite this way—that perhaps something in the very nature of sound invites us to pay attention more slowly.

Stephanie Rowden's “sound portraits” are encountered as frames or sculptures often containing tiny doors instead of pictures. Upon opening the doors, the visitor hears a poem, a song, a lengthy anecdote. A work specially commissioned for the exhibition "S.O.S." at The Tang Museum focused on the lives and stories of the Tang's hometown of Saratoga Springs, offering elusive yet insightful perspectives on the city's history and culture. Rowden's other site-related soundworks include installations in a museum portrait gallery at The Brooklyn Museum, the vaults under the Brooklyn Bridge shown at Art in the Anchorage, and a vaudeville-era silent movie-house lobby displayed at The Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor. She has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the MacDowell Colony and is a recipient of a Mid-Atlantic Arts Alliance/National Endowment for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship. Her work is regularly featured at Littlejohn Contemporary.