Pagel, David. “High art, low culture collide,” Los Angeles Times, May 8, 2009, p D12, reprod.
Jean Lowe’s paintings of Bavarian palaces made over into big-box discount outlets are as reasonable and believable as they are preposterous. Their wicked mixture of giddy hilarity and deadly sobriety puts them in tune with our times, when things are not what they seem and topsy-turvy absurdity seems to have replaced levelheaded stability as society’s modus operandi.
From the moment you step into the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, it’s clear that you’re in a familiar world, a banal and terrifying place filled with Costcos and Wal-Marts as well as more ostentatious displays of wealth. But something is out of whack.
Titled “Love for Sale,” the show’s 10 small collages, 12 big paintings and 56 prop-style books (on two papier-mâché shelves) put visitors in mind of a future even stranger than the present. Think Vegas’ flashiest casinos retrofitted as factory-second stores. Or Soviet-era chateaux that have fallen on hard times and are forced to sell overstocked leftovers.
In the entryway, a series of page-size collages packs the lavish interiors of baroque castles with aisle upon aisle of discount consumer goods. Polyester slacks and gallon bottles of bleach jostle for your attention among stacks of trash bins, towers of light beer, piles of plastic floor mats and super-sized packages of candy. In the background, marble columns, crystal chandeliers and mural-scale paintings of aristocrats, angels and gods kick the onslaught of visual stimulation into high gear.
Lowe has cut and pasted together her point-and-shoot pictures with none of the sleek seamlessness of digitally manipulated imagery. Jarring shifts exist between one snapshot and another. This recalls the disruptive incoherence of early 20th century Cubism and the head-spinning pace of Italian Futurism. It also harks back to David Hockney’s kaleidoscopic photo-collages from the 1980s, although with more Dr. Frankenstein-style fragmentation and punk chaos.
The photos in Lowe’s collages were made in stores in Southern California and on a summer trip to southern Germany’s most popular castles. They serve as highly detailed studies for the stunning enamels on canvas that fill three adjoining galleries and spill into an office.
Lowe’s paintings are even stranger than her collages. Many measure up to 8 feet long and 6 or 7 feet high. All smooth over the visual turbulence of the collages, creating spaces that induce wooziness.
Labyrinthine passages weave their way between cheap shelves and wood palettes, all stacked with bargain-priced items that are neither glamorous nor extravagant. The ceilings, walls and balustrade-festooned balconies do not follow the rules of perspective but undulate freely, as if under the influence of powerful hallucinogens or buckets of booze. Terra firma seems slippery and unstable.
Lowe’s casual paint handling causes the consumer goods she depicts to look better than they do in life. It also makes the Baroque paintings and ceiling murals look worse. This compromise between high art and low culture suggests that splitting the difference between extremes creates a mutation both queasy and questionable.
The titles of the thick, papier-mâché tomes on Lowe’s pair of bookshelves chart the absurdities of a world turned on its ear. “Regulating Empathy,” “Who’s Who in American Prisons,” “Contemporary Genocide in Perspective,” “The Low-Impact Freak-Out,” “Hooked on Addiction Memoirs,” “Torture Preparedness,” “Foreclosure Etiquette” and “What Would Satan Eat?” make rationality and its opposite into comic co-conspirators whose antics are tacky, true and tuned into the present.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery Press Release, 2009
Rosamund Felsen Gallery is pleased to announce the upcoming show of Jean Lowe, presenting an impressive new body of work comprised of large and small-scale paintings. Lowe continues her conflations of high and low cultural spaces in her staggering combinations of interiors of baroque Bavarian palaces and big-box and large thrift stores. The artist creates paintings derived from her photographs of locations she has traveled to. The resulting compositions are accumulations of fictional hyper-real spaces.
The dizzying effect of looking at the lofty ceilings of these baroque interiors in the upper part of the paintings is reflected in the lower part with the disorienting racks of merchandise in large retail stores. Both overwhelm with their immense proportions while also offering thousands of details competing for our attention. The work possesses the scale-shifting awe of the original sites she visited. The artist, who works in sculptural installation as well as painting, conceives these paintings as installations the viewer can almost step into.
In these flat panels a painterly universe unfolds and as we approach we are rewarded with rich detail and surprising revelations hardly noticeable from afar. Enamel paint requires the artist to plan her choices very thoughtfully and accurately giving the works an unusual tension between flat opacity and rich varied detail. Lowe’s expanded painterly information reinforces the fictional feeling of her compositions. Her inventive process results in breathtaking expansions of interior spaces.
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"Jean Lowe's Freudian Parslips," by John C. Welchman, for Gastronomica, Winter, 2009
Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion, Jean Lowe's recent exhibition in New York and Los Angeles, leads us to the heart- better, the stomach- of her wickedly insouciant, word-driven, gastro-visual humor. Taken from one of the garrulous, spoof book covers that populate the show, her title crosses the gung-ho language of corporate promotion with a rhetoric of fitness– only to skewer both with a phantom declaration of psychological recovery. Lowe's wittily peevish paradox meets the provocative injunction of dissident pop-cultural analyst Slavoj Zizek to "enjoy your symptom," as she admonishes us– mouth first– to embrace, perpetuate, and exacerbate our "delusions."
Lowe's ironic administration of the delusional reaches us in the form of Barnes-and-Noble-style, "bestseller" book racks packed with improbably colorful volumes, their covers turned toward the viewers or consumers they solicit. Each tome is a palpably handmade, papier-mâché object finished in glossy enamel paint that joins with the ensemble to form a panorama of edgy, cartoon-like vulgarity. True to their mall or high-street context, the books are loosely consigned around topical subjects ranging from DIY to dieting, from save-the-planet pamphlets to pop psychology. Founded in the artist's wittily elaborate gestures of surrogate publication, with which she first took up in the early 1990s, Lowe conjures a dissenting semantics from her array of books, derailing their conventional significations (of professional competence, consumerist distraction, or unremitting self-improvement) and substituting a sly commentary on the culture of narcissism.
Food lies at the symbolic center of this rebarbative bibliophilia, acting as a kind of synecdoche of parts warmed over from a blighted whole, a corrosive set of deviant stand-ins for the wider social and political conditions satirized by the artist. To the bigotries of organized religion and its compliantly pious tomes, Lowe responds with Just Ask God: Hot and Stacked (with its syrup-drenched pancake stack) or Growing Up Isn't Easy Lord (with man and child governed by their alcoholic beverages). To the dubious assurance of gender politics or radical feminism, she retorts with Militant Feminist Veganism for All (illustrated with what she terms a "super labial Venus de Willendorf") and The Battered Women's Cookbook (with its witty rib-eye steak). To the depredations of "big pharma" she replies with a dedicated series, Pharmaceutical Solutions, which addresses "Boredom," "Grandiosity," "Disappointment," "Loneliness," "Athlete's Foot," and "Grief"- as well as "Erectile Dysfunction," "Lice/Menopause," and three volumes on "Alcohol and Drug Problems." The burgeoning cookbook industry is the specific target of a whole rack of parodies– geographic (A Taste of Omaha), symptomatic (The IBS Cookbook), convenience (Savvy Fast Food Choices), and more.
In a previous incarnation, segments of Lowe's licentious library were given a more specific location in The Loneliness Clinic (2004-2007), her rambunctious simulation of a psychiatrist's waiting room office. Confected from signature life-size, papier-mâché models– of tables, chairs, a couch, an ottoman, and paintings– these spaces also contained a magazine rack and shelves set with fabricated books, magazines, objects, an curios, including a pair of kooky covers for bootleg editions of Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines. Lowe cleverly transforms the waiting room– that preamble to the interface between science and its subject public– into an arena for reading between the lines, for overactive projection, and for the accommodation of a general restlessness of being that debunks the frameworks and etiquettes of the talking cure. In her work, the space of mental restitution itself now becomes a symptom of the wider culture of narcissism that has willed it into existence. Lowe takes on what Christopher Lasch termed the "imperialism" of the psychiatric industry and its inhibition of spontaneity, so that in her hands the whole apparatus of self-help– the industry of how-to, can-do, and guidance manuals and the spine of food and consumption that holds them together– is revealed as a parody of the very health and wellness it purports to promote. Lowe offers the space and time otherwise killed or tranquilized by the situational normativity of the waiting room, a salient resurrection. But they are regurgitated with a life of their own, administering to their clients and passersby a salutary dose of what Salvador Dalí– another artist whose aesthetics of edibility crosses obsession and symbolic reverie– termed "critical paranoia," as their environment turns humorously hostile by interpreting them back. It was Dalí, of course, who famously preferred "delusion" to artistic spontaneity– likening the latter to the "stereotypical taste of to the unvarying restaurant crawfish"– and whose defiantly unorthodox brand of "comic humor" was "always a step ahead of his ideas."
So it is that Lowe trains her mordant wit on the cultures of excess and deprivation measured out by our regimens of greed, consumption, and both nutritional and psychological dysfunction. Alcoholism and anorexia, for example, generally provide poor company for comedic irreverence, and few artists have successfully engaged them in any dimension, let alone to the accompaniment of laughter. But Lowe takes on these stigmatized illnesses in a unique compound of unswerving giddiness and satirical glee, secured by her consummate command of the graphic, painterly and textural parameters that converge with fearless yet unforced commentary on the covers of her faux editions. Sometimes her titles are apparently literal and descriptive, as with Six Simple Steps to A Better Attitude. But instead of correlating the anticipated improvements with bullet points or happy diagrams Lowe's illustration assembles six glasses, each filled with a different colored cocktail. The vaunted path to the amelioration of bad "attitudes" is fortified by escapist detours, so that any quick fix coherence and sobriety is ambushed by the very temptations that confound it. Lowe gives us here an image-driven version of the delusional paradox that animates her book projects.
In other instances, pointedly aphoristic text supplies the motor force for a more biting critique. In Anxiety: The Unexploited Weight Loss Tool, for example, the title itself converts the general plus/minus binarisms of Lowe's elliptical paradoxes into a benighted formula that comes up lose, lose. The negative of anxiety begets the false positive of weight loss, so that one disorder catalyzes another. Nor is there any refuge in the comforts of professional discourse or academic wisdom, such as those presided over by the offstage protagonist of The Loneliness Clinic, a certain Dr. Pohattaen. Neither the clinical environment nor the products of institutional knowledge bear much fruit for Lowe, who bursts their pretensions mercilessly in such titles as The Philosophy of Binge Drinking or Preparing for You Career as a Lactation Consultant, which pictures a young boy at a soda-fountain counter in front of a sundae.
While wit takes center stage in this carnival of gaudy delusions– doctors, professors, and their ilk are banished to the wings– Lowe's critique also engages, at times profoundly, with the structures used by twentieth-century psychoanalysis to understand the mechanisms of the mind. In fact, her cascade of puns, innuendos, and smutty humor, and the off-kilter shuttle between text and image that sustains them, create new artistic circuits between wit and food, dreams and projections, which have remarkable parallels with the way Sigmund Freud set about unraveling the operations of the unconscious. Both use jokes and comestibles as their leading actors; and for both, the need (and desire) for sustenance is not simply one of the triumvirate of founding drives– along with self-preservation and libidinal gratification– but is at the same time emblematic, even in dreams, of the "reality" of the quotidian world– of those "simple and unimportant occupations of everyday life, such as packing trunks, preparing food in the kitchen, "as Freud puts it.
In addition to focusing the primary "exigencies of life," Freud's discussion of wish-fulfillment makes recourse to the most basic scenario of want and will represented by the hungry infant and follows it up with accounts of the relatively simple prompts represented by his own food-based dreams, such as the "salted anchovies," as well as the "stwawbewwies, wild stwawbwwies, omblet, pudden" sleep talk, pseudo-dream of his daughter Anna.
Lowe, like Freud, is interested in the relation between these apparently grounded significations and more complex rounds of association that arise as food crosses over into other symbolic territories– as the oral merges with the libidinal and rituals of food consumption broker fundamental relations of kinship, marriage, taboos, and larger forms of social organization. Freud uses another one of his own dreams, that of "the three Fates" (or Parcae), to stake out preliminaries for the enmeshment of food in the symbolic domain: this was "clearly a hunger dream," he notes, "but it succeeded in shifting the cravings for nourishment back to a child's longing for his mother's breast, and it made use of an innocent desire as a screen for a more serious one which could not be so openly displayed." To put it briefly, one might claim that the associative journey embarked on here culminates in Freud's extraordinary accounts of food-related dreams in which words themselves, in the forms of puns and double-entendres, finally detour the basic exigencies of the comestible into the symbolic abstractions of language. We witness this move in a "dream-composition" so elaborate that Freud suggests it "might be entitled "'The Language of Flowers,'" the preamble to which is framed by a woman who went "into the kitchen where her two maids were, and found fault with them for not having got her 'bite of food' ready." The physical or literal diminishment associated with the little "bite" is balanced here by rhetorical engorgement at the level of association and symbolization. Something similar transpires in the famous "breakfast ship" dream, though here the dreamer's punning associations are engendered by the knowledge of two languages, German and English.
Lowe is heir to these founding elisions of edibility and euphemistic language, as her garish, childlike images, like the implications of Freud's starving infant, are overwritten by wildly plausible inference and constant tropic revisions. But while Freud provides the model for opening out the symbolic association of food into language and the social order, Lowe reports back on the diminishment of its prospects in the era of food as a ready-made. As her regimen of content-less, full-frontal, crypto-books suggests, the legatees of the "me" generation in the new millennium merely recalibrate the zoning of their narcissism, synthesizing, in the process, any new technology, social innovation, or political expediency into the self-serving culture of the caption, as the tidbit merges with the sound bite.
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Jean Lowe: Achieve and Maintain A More Powerful Delusion by Ken Johnson for The New York Times
Here’s a book that some people might find useful: “10 Steps to Becoming a Published Author in Your Next Life.” No? How about “Napping: An Inexpensive Way to Stay Busy”? Or “Craft Your Way to Mental Health,” which has the picture of a heavily frosted gingerbread house on its cover?
These are 3 of more than 200 volumes in Jean Lowe’s laugh-out-loud exhibition. Based in San Diego, Ms. Lowe has specialized in constructing satiric museum-style period rooms out of papier-mâché and enamel paint. For this show she has created a library of invented titles and displayed them on bookshelves covered with wood-grain-patterned paper, right. Also made of papier-mâché and colorfully painted with a skillful, loose touch, the books imitate various genres, including self-help, children’s storybooks, academic tomes, law books and popular potboilers. You can’t open them — they’re blocky, sculptural volumes without inside pages — which is just as well, because the covers are more than enough.
The action is mainly in the verbal and visual interplay. “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” shows a fork digging into a big piece of chocolate cake. “6 Simple Steps to a Better Attitude” is illustrated by a half-dozen drinks in cocktail glasses. Some titles, like “Torture Preparedness,” are more sobering. Some are self-reflexive. In “Conceptual Art: Subverting a Commodity Driven Practice Paradigm,” which has a marked-down sticker price of $1.50, Ms. Lowe makes fun of her own intellectual pretensions.
While many of her books are individually hilarious, cumulatively they add up to something more: a fun-house-mirror reflection of the American consciousness industry, warts, blind spots and all. (Through March 15, McKenzie Fine Art, 511 West 25th Street, Chelsea, 212-989-5467, mckenziefineart.com.)
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Jean Lowe at Rosamund Felsen by Leah Ollman for Art in America
Jean Lowe (b. 1960) ia a satirist in the grand tradition off Daumier, Hogarth and Nast, although her vehicle is not the human face or figure. With penetrating wit and insight, she appropriates authoritative forms of communication and display, refashioning them as vehicles for social critique. Her closest contemporary counterpart may be Stephen Colbert. Over the years, Lowe has pressed the grandiose and banal into tight complicity and addressed a range of social and environmental issues: the exploitation of animals, the culture of excess, overdevelopment and the rape of the landscape.
For over a decade, Lowe has adopted the form of the printed book for use in her work, often incorporating books into full scale installations. Here she created over 200 titles that expose the flaws and foibles of American culture as it exists today. The books, crafted of papier-mache and painted in enamel, mostly faced out, cover foremost, from nine tall cardboard bookcases adorned with faux woodgrain finish. Larger, fatter and clumsier than the real thing, the books came across as playful caricatures, their covers rendered with upbeat innocence. Reflected in the mostly invented titles was a sense of the artist herself, as well as a clever incisive, hilarious and dismaying collective self-portrait.
A few titles paid straightforward tribute to other artists or existing texts-Candida Hofer's volume of photographs Libraries, Flann O'Brien's novel -but most tweaked familiar idiom, mocking the self-righteous, self-interested art world (Conceptual Art: Subverting a Commodity Driven Practice Paradigm) or gently spoofing purist cuisine (Irresponsible Vegan Delights). Lowe updated classic children's' series with titles alluding to sex and drugs (First Time for Skipper, a "Barbie Golden Book," and Nancy Drew's The Clue in the Meth Lab) and riffed brilliantly on the popularity of self-help books by including volumes on anxiety as a weight-loss tool, torture preparedness, and various sordid guides to economic opportunism. (Sugested investment opportunities include breast augmentation reversal, a destabilized Middle East and the diabetes epidemic, among others.)
Lowe took on a plethora of linked social phenomena in this installation: the use and abuse of religion for personal and political ends; the medicalization of experience, every condition calling for it's own pharmaceutical solution; rampant consumerism and self obsession. The American way of life, according to Lowe's Library, steers citizens toward a common goal, to Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion, as the title of one of her "books" would have it. The means: Freedom from Rigor and Competence.
Lowe's skewering sensibility slackened a bit in a series of paintings, displayed separately, of commercial interiors (a gym, a 99-cent store, a chain bookseller and an electronics superstore). The scenes are familiar enough to seem benign, but Lowe's panoramic views amplified the absurd abundance and generic predictability of the environments just enough to elicit some unease. In a third gallery, Lowe recast a baby grand piano as a snack dispenser, its paper-mache lid raised to reveal bagged chips and beer and soda on ice. The trappings of drawingroom civility, from oriental rug to potted palm, were all beautifully faked, and the farcical setup had great charm. Vibrantly patterned mandalas (in the form of paintings on domed foam) clung to the surrounding walls like oversize brooches or cosmic Frisbees, endearingly awkward hybrids of the ornamental and meditative.
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No need to read beyond the book title
By Leah Ollman of the Los Angeles Times
Browse an individual’s bookshelves and you’re likely to glean some insight into the reader’s personality and sensibility. Our books mirror ourselves, from our highest aspirations to our lowly indulgences. Crime fiction best sellers, lyric poetry, celebrity biographies, Oprah picks, literary nonfiction, self-help manuals – they all offer clues.
Browse the mock bookshelves in Jean Lowe’s show at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery and you will see reflected a sense of the artist herself, of course, but also a clever, incisive, hilarious and dismaying collective portrait of dysfunctional American culture.
These nine tall bookcases, built out of cardboard and painted with a faux wood-grain finish, hold more than 200 titles, most facing out. The books are actually papier-mâché objects, their titles and cover images painted in enamel. Fatter and clunkier than real books, they come across as playful caricatures.
And playful they are, with such titles as “When to Tell Your Husband He’s Adopted,” “Misanthropes Make Bitter Lovers” and “Frequent Problems Associated with Failure to Adapt to Life Outside the Uterus.” Lowe pays homage to some genuine books (Flann O’Brien’s novel “The Third Policeman,” for instance), credits herself as author of several (the sunny orange-covered “The Way of the Optimist,” among others) and presents a wishful volume of her own catalogue raissonné.
She riffs brilliantly on familiar children’s series, adding a contemporary edge to Nancy Drew’s adventures with “The Clue in the Meth Lab.” She shows the girl detective with a suspiciously swollen belly on the cover of “The Secret of the Lost Weekend.” Lowe also has invented new series: cookbooks of vegan delights (from romantic to irresponsible) and handbooks of economic opportunism. The “Charting the Course” series offers investor guides to “The Future of Breast Augmentation Reversal” and “The Burgeoning Diabetes Epidemic.”
Lowe’s work has long been driven by social critique. She’s addressed the exploitation of animals, the culture of excess, the rape of the landscape. Here she takes on a plethora of linked societal phenomena: the use and abuse of religion for personal and political ends; the medicalization of experience, every condition calling for it’s own pharmaceutical solution; rampant consumerism and self-obsession; and much more. The American way of life exposes itself across these shelves. The goal? “Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion.” The means? “Freedom From Rigor and Competence.”
Lowe is a satirist in the grand tradition of Daumier, Hogarth and Nast. Her closest contemporary counterparts may be Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. Like them, Lowe adopts an existing credible, authoritative genre and injects it with wry style to lay bare the flaws and foibles of the status quo. Papier-mâché helps give the work a look of sprightly, clumsy innocence, which she subverts with knowing jabs at the dysfunctionality of ordinary life.
The bookcases occupy one of three rooms at the gallery. In another, Lowe presents paintings of a chain bookstore, electronics store, gym and 99-cent store. Each view bends back at the edges, as if seen through a wide-angle lens, adding to the wooziness already induced by the environments’ marketing-driven scale and vividly artificial color schemes. The paintings don’t have as much bite as the books, nor the radical charm of what’s in the third gallery: a papier-mâché baby grand with iced soft drinks and packaged snacks beneath its raised lid. Behind and around it, brightly patterned mandalas (painted on domed foam) stick to the wall, like cosmic Frisbees flung and frozen there. The mandalas invite a flowery sort of bliss, but for meditation on wackier, wiser matters, head back to the books.
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 Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion, 2007
For her third exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Jean Lowe stages another parable of cultural criticism. Several freestanding bookcases made of enamel paint on papier-mâché house over 200 books also made of enamel paint on papier-mâché. With fictional titles such as Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion and The Taking of South Coast Plaza, or in some cases real titles such as The Power of Positive Thinking (remapped onto what looks like the cover of a romance novel) and Contemporary Genocide, Lowe’s installation takes us from the humorous to the dire through the perilous micro-economies of desire and self-worth that frame the complacency of our hyper-individualized consumer culture. Elsewhere in the gallery four landscape paintings in enamel on masonite lift us out of the mire of our individual concerns only to bump us up against the ceilings of the mega-stores that nurture and contain them. In the project room a series of large, beautifully rendered, three-dimensional mandala paintings surround a baby grand piano that doubles as an ice chest. Cold drinks will be available throughout the exhibition.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. March 17, 2007 from 5-7pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Edward Sterrett at 310.828.8488
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by Grace Glueck of The New York Times at McKenzie Fine Art, NYC
In her show at McKenzie two years ago, Jean Lowe created a high-camp furniture installation of papier-mâché, taking off on the fancy Empire mode of early 19th-century décor. Now she's at it again, this time slyly constructing a psychiatrist's waiting room and office with all the right accouterments: Breuer chairs and tables, a George Nelson sling sofa, a Barcelona ottoman, a rubber plant, stacks of Kleenex boxes, a shelf full of Greek and Egyptian artifacts with Freudian gravitas.
Magazine racks hold a mix of real and fake publications, like the fictitious Weight Watcher, with an article titled "Anxiety: The Unexploited Weight Loss Tool" and Psychology on Line, with "Porn Together." Diplomas that line the wall turn out on close inspection to be things like a certificate of participation in Harvard crew and a distinguished scholar award from Palo Alto High School. A bookshelf holds works like "Loopholes: Exemptions and Dodges."
Ms. Lowe's sculptural skills, just on the edge of cartoony, continue to amaze, and her satire has not lost its sting.
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Peter Frank of The LA Weekly
Jean Lowe’s target in her installation “The Loneliness Clinic” is “popular” psychiatry. Her confabulation of a shrink’s office, right down to the weighty tomes and the elaborate certificates, is droll enough. It’s the “Doctors Notes” in the backroom, however, that hit the funnybone spot on. The notes — a sequence of painted legal pads — brim with caustic observations about the analysand, unintentionally self-revealing comments and entirely irrelevant notations that betray a wandering mind. What makes all this shrink humor not seem Nichols-and-May anachronistic is the enduring humanness of the foibles portrayed — and of Lowe’s use of the intimate medium of paint to make these artifacts come alive. Working in an installational format also gives Lowe the means to josh painting itself; she renders an immense view of suburban San Diego as if it were a mid-17th-century Dutch landscape.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Doug Harvey of The LA Weekly
Another Southern California artist fruitfully blurring these genre boundaries is San Diego’s Jean Lowe, whose latest installation, The Loneliness Clinic, is currently ensconced at Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Lowe’s last show at RFG was dominated by a series of enormous landscape paintings conflating 18th-century French Empire aesthetics with contemporary multinational corporate sprawl. Though a powerful and funny showing somewhat akin to Sandow Birk’s ambitious projects, the real treat for me was tucked away in the side gallery — a library of loosely painted papier-mâché dummy books on equally faux bookshelves, belonging to one hypothetical "Dr. Pohaten." The painting and sculptural novelty of the work was surpassed only by the tremendous (and biting) humor of its individual components — the eight-volume edition of How To Simplify Your Life, for example.
The Loneliness Clinic reverses these proportions, with a single landscape of an archetypal La Jolla housing development occupying the side gallery, and what appears to be the psychiatric offices and waiting room of Dr. Pohaten filling the large main space. Lowe’s earlier installations also contained plenty of Empire-style furniture and decorative knickknacks rendered in the same enamel on papier-mâché as the books. The Loneliness Clinic is appointed with an appropriately modernist sensibility that ups the ante considerably. A rickety simulacrum of a Louis XIV armchair as a metaphor for the impending collapse of the Western capitalist empire is palatable-enough critique in art and academic circles. Start messing with a black-leather Eames office chair and the academic sacred cow of the "talking cure," though, and you’re hitting much closer to home.
Slapstick gibes (the Donald Judd–like configurations of Kleenex boxes) and subtle detail (the pitch-perfect potted plant) abound in the furnishings, which manage to successfully update and politicize the hand-painted pop sculptures of Oldenburg et al. — but The Loneliness Clinic hits its stride with its marriage of masterful paint handling and textual content. The waiting area is supplied with a superabundance of reading material, including an unopened bundle of clam-adorned Feminist New Englander magazine and two large racks displaying titles like Modern Careers ("Six Simple Steps To Enjoying Your Job" over a six-pack of Coors Light) and Gourmet ("Sexy Dinners" over a praying mantis eating her mate). The good doctor’s office is well-stocked with more books and periodicals (The Moral Life: Loopholes, Exemptions and Dodges; Making Court-Ordered Community Service a Full-time Job) and an impressive array of framed certificates, which on close inspection range from a DMV revocation of driver’s-license suspension (much fancier than the one I got) to a document declaring the absent physician a winner in the Lawry’s 5-lbs. Challenge.
But the literary strain takes its strongest and funniest turn in a mini tour de force in the rear gallery. Across the surface of 20 sculpted "pads" of yellow legal notepaper, Lowe draws a scathing portrait of the blithely narcissistic analyst with notes like "10/12: Pt. appears agitated, unkempt. Expresses suicidal ideation. Talked about feeling depressed and wanting to ‘end it all.’ (I’m tempted to help her if she keeps scratching my Le Corbusier.)" You don’t need to know that this work was inspired by rummaging through the effects of Lowe’s late father — a shrink, of course — to appreciate the complex narrative interplay encoded in its visually sumptuous paint-handling and subversive artsy-craftsy sculptural tropes. What takes Lowe’s work to a new level in The Loneliness Clinic is the use of an absent fictional protagonist to tie together the artist’s wide-ranging literary, visual, environmental and sociopolitical concerns into a persuasive and entertaining whole. And it’s good for you.
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at the Museum of Contemporary Art by Leah Ollman of Art in America
Since the late 1980’s, Jean Lowe has been making flamboyant, funny work motivated by outrage. While the targets of Lowe’s protests are fairly predictable – the manipulation of the landscape to suit housing and development needs, the keeping of animals in zoos and their training in circuses – her approach is deliciously idiosyncratic in its marriage of conscience and levity. This show, titled “The Evolutionary Cul de Sac,” surveyed Lowe’s paintings, papier mâché sculptures and installations of the past dozen years, succinctly summing up her concerns for the victims – animal, vegetable and otherwise – of our presumptuous, exploitative habits.
Lowe uses a vocabulary of opulence and excess to satirize the human compulsion toward both abundance and amusement. Her works are oversized, often bordering on the garish. Their humor is prickly and relentlessly self-mocking.
The show opened with a stunning installation of four new, monumental landscape paintings (each up to 26 feet wide) on unstretched canvas nailed to the wall. Lowe painted ornate faux frames around each image, giving the ensemble a stately, epic presence that belied the shameful practices represented within. The landscapes show soft hills blunted, shaved, paved and plumbed to make way for cookie-cutter homes in developments with names that pay false homage to the landscape they’ve just violated. Painted in restless strokes, neither lush nor finicky, the images are as beautiful as they are confrontational. Like all of Lowe’s work, they exercise a sort of barbed seduction, abrading the conscience as they assuage the senses.
The earliest works in the show veered toward the didactic – paintings that functioned as visual primers, tracing the unsavory paths by which such staples as eggs and meat arrive on our plates. Lowe’s work has gradually grown more nuanced. “Accomplishments of Man” (1992-93) is a full-scale salon interior, dripping with Lowe’s version of Rococo decoration: paintings celebrating the harnessing of nature (a dam altering water’s natural course, crops irrigated in the desert); ornate furniture upon whose fabric surfaces are painted tools of measurement and science; and in the background, as wallpaper, painted images of real natural wonders like Yosemite, the Everglades and Monument Valley. Among the accomplishments we credit as our own are the riches nature offers as well as those we’ve forced out of her. Another installation, “Gentlemen’s Club” (1995), features painted ‘wallpaper’ with views of logged and burned forest – a habitat we’ve pushed our primate cousins out of – and a zoo and circus, which we’ve pushed them into.
Artifice prevails throughout Lowe’s work, as both self-conscious style and insistent lesson that our lust for control over all living things has gotten ludicrously out of hand. Six-foot-tall papier mâché urns, charmingly clumsy, sport painted landscapes lifted from Coors cans and Lysol air fresheners. Oversized wooden gallery benches made for show are painted with exaggerated wood grain patterns. Lowe plays right into our perpetual craving for entertainment, even as she exposes our arrogant efforts to use the rest of the natural world as our raw material.
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at California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA by Michael Duncan, for Catalogue essay
For most Americans, an experience of “nature” means a vacation jaunt through Yosemite or the Berkshires in a climate-controlled van with a fresh supply of allergy pills and insect repellent. The sprawling suburbanizing of America has taught us to blind ourselves to cavalier condo-stripping and mall-ification and to ignore power-lines, strip-mines and the log-rolled hilltops as we peer out the window at the pretty scenery. When visualizing the natural world, we blithely choose to focus on the rarefied terrain of our national parks. Ironically, as the disparity between our overdeveloped hills and the unblemished national forest increases, “nature” becomes more and more of an artificial concept – a superfluous mode of ornamentation and decoration for our hyper-industrialized society.
In her full-scale, mock Louis XVI salon, artist Jean Lowe reveals the roots of the idealized notion of “nature” in the decorative traditions of Neoclassicism. Late eighteenth century French decoration embraced classical motifs inspired by the then-recent finds at Herculaneum and Pompeii. These motifs featured Arcadian animals and landscapes representing the “purer” natural states of ancient Greece and Rome. Similarly, Neoclassical landscape painters interpreted ancient settings derived from classical literature. In 1800, painter and theorist Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes admiringly described how the founders of historical landscape painting such as Poussin, Annibale Carracci, Titan and Domenichino were inspired by readings of Homer, Virgil and Ovid. According to Valenciennes, these masters closed their eyes to see ideal nature, a nature “adorned with the riches of the imagination, which only genius can conceive and represent.”
In her Americanized update of Neoclassical decoration, Jean Lowe opens her eyes to our culture’s odd relationship with the natural world. With a gutsy historical accuracy, her salon shows the connection between Neoclassical landscapes and the idealized mountain scenery pictured on our bottles of Calistoga Springs water and Coors Beer. This historical and cultural leap is not as far as one might think. The United States is, after all, a product of Neoclassicism; it is a country intended from its outset to rival the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. Our treatment of nature, however, has hardly been “classical.” Over the past two hundred years, we have quickly consumed the bulk of our vast “untouched” natural resources. Yet, despite our voracious appetites, nature continues to be fetishized by our culture, evident in everything from our manicured front lawns and poodle-trimmed hedges, to our sanctified parks and wildlife preserves, to the mass marketing of “natural” foods and “The Nature Company” bric-a-brac.
Lowe’s tapestry-like paintings reveal the results of America’s “Manifest Destiny” and the idea of progress. They depict beautiful California mountains – transected by hills – covered with new housing projects, an expanse of grazing cattle – bred for the slaughterhouse. As the room makes wittily evident, everywhere today, nature has been altered by mankind.
Yet Lowe is not making a simple ecological protest. Her landscapes are by no means completely degraded by man. Our intervention also creates aesthetically pleasing effects, such as the fluid, ribbon-like white line of a freeway or the classical vanishing-point perspective afforded by neat, straight rows of lettuce plants. A dam’s waterfall is a legitimate man-made “natural” wonder, one that is now generally regarded as a site of “real nature.”
The delicious joke of Lowe’s mock-historical installation is that the room’s immediate decorative impact overshadows its caustic imagery. Only after inspection of the lavish, captivating space, do we notice small recurring motifs that slightly sour the conceit: weeds, copulating locusts, fast-food litter, chemical vials. A luscious “Oldenburgian” papier mâché cornucopia laden with fruit has on closer inspection, a scorpion’s tail.
With the eighteenth century-flair of Pope or Dryden, Lowe rebukes us with irony’s gentle sting. Her glamorous interior draws us into enjoyment of man-made alterations of the landscape that are of dubious ecological (or aesthetic) merit. Lured by the embellishments and décor, we catch ourselves sharing in the pompous glorification of man’s “progress” over nature. Lowe also clearly relishes her salon’s decoration. Thus, her room is a seductively guilty pleasure, one that excludes neither herself nor the room’s admirers from serious critique.
By depicting how the condos squeeze out the pastureland, Lowe reveals how the industrialized world has undone the notion of nature as Arcadia. She depicts in her open-eyed, parodic decoration the inevitable debasement of this high-flown cultural ideal. Underlying her project is the suggestion that the ongoing struggle between culture and nature must be confronted directly. If not, the scorpion tail of that bountiful cornucopia will exact its price. Nature will make sure of it.
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Christopher Knight of The Los Angeles Times
Just in time for the latest American adventure abroad comes "Empire Style," a smart and sardonic installation by Lowe has turned the main room into a time-warp salon, rendering with contemporary élan the late 18th century French taste for all things sovereign. The floor is covered with an area rug emblazoned with imperial eagles and laurel garlands, while the walls are lined with gilded commodes, stools, soup tureens and clocks — one adorned with the central cast of Roman male characters from Jacques-Louis David's iconic 1784 ode to republican virtue, "The Oath of the Horatii." All are fashioned from brightly painted papier-mâché and given a cartoonish bent, comic books being the lingua franca of our day.
What would a proper Empire salon be without hand-painted wallpaper showing the classical landscape? Here, the Arcadian vista is viewed from the center of a neatly lined parking lot in a suburban shopping mall. Nestled amid leafy trees beneath billowy skies, Wal-Mart, Starbucks and Bed, Bath & Beyond stand in for Constantinople, Thebes and the Colosseum. In the murals the faintly ridiculous quality of the cartoon furnishings gives way to an elegance of brushwork and luminous color — which, all things considered, injects the scene with the requisite shudder of stark authority.
In the back room Lowe shows a dozen painted papier-mâché versions of Gian Lorenzo Bernini's magnificent life-size sculpture "Apollo and Daphne," in which the classical god of prophecy and poetry attempts to rape a gorgeous nymph, who escapes the crime by turning into a laurel tree. Bernini's dazzling sculpture set Borghese-era Rome atwitter in 1624, mostly for the scrupulous mastery of its illusionistic carving.
Lowe's knickknack-size sculptures are notably lumpy and purposefully inept, tilting precariously rather than with Baroque drama. Unlike Bernini, she emphasizes a homemade quality that eschews the official diversions of shock and awe. Each witty sculpture is painted in broad imitation of a different type of wood — laurel, oak, walnut — suggesting that the best escape from the oppressive powers that be is through a transformation into art.
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Jody Zellen of ArtScene
Jean Lowe is a San Diego-based artist whose installation works replicate European Parlor rooms while simultaneously inserting a contemporary point of view. Lowe often paints her imagery directly on the walls and makes objects from papier-mâché. Her installations have a purposely low-tech aesthetic and are readily accessible, but she makes a deeper political and social statement about consumerism and the impact of development on the natural landscape. For this new installation Empire Style, she transforms the front gallery space into a parlor-like setting. Painted directly on the gallery walls, wrapping around the perimeter are large-scale works mimicking 18th century French landscape painting. The lush landscape and idyllic setting serves as the backdrop for Lowe’s intervention. Alongside depictions of sublime skies enveloping the Alps and greenery surrounding classical structures, Lowe inserts Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks and Bed Bath and Beyond, corporate icons prevalent in the contemporary landscape. Stand in the center of the space, you’ll feel like you’re in the paintings. Lowe positions us in the parking lot and we immediately identify with the parked cars and familiar mini-mall décor. Yet even as she presents this contemporary landscape she surrounds it with furniture and artifacts from the Napoleonic era.
The Empire Style was prevalent in France during the first part of the 19th century, obtaining its name from the First Empire of France of which Napoleon I (Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769-1821) was the emperor. Traditional classical motifs were supplemented by symbols of imperial grandeur: the Emperor's monogram and his emblem, the bee, representations of military trophies and Egyptian motifs. Furniture was characterized by clear-cut silhouettes and symmetry in decoration. Lowe’s furniture, fashioned from papier-mâché, is a celebration of funkiness. Rather than identify with the power and wealth of the Empire, she makes her furniture a cartoon version of the original, and in so doing makes the room welcoming rather than off limits. Lowe takes her critique even further. In addition to making papier-mâché furniture, she also creates tchotchkes—knick-knack sculptures, tabletop clocks of horse and buggy riders, and stoic soldiers that adorn the faux-Empire Style furniture.
Lowe continues her simulation of classical works in the gallery’s second room. Here Lowe presents a number of wall sculptures based on Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne. In Bernini’s original, Apollo holds onto Daphne just as she metamorphoses into a tree to avoid capture. In Lowe’s versions the tree of each papier-mâché sculpture is painted to look like a different kind of wood, perhaps a romantic reference to nature lost.
In almost all of her installations Lowe has created works based on a well-known painting or sculptural style--Rococo, Baroque, etc.--and infused these styles with a contemporary twist. As Kate Bonansings has suggested, "By using a visual vocabulary associated with affluence, Lowe subversively comments on modern life." Her works explore the exploited, whether animal, human or landscape; her subjects have ranged from AIDS to the deforestation of the western United States to the laboratory testing of animals Lowe’s style is purposely and purposefully garish and over the top. Her paintings are as realistic as they are confrontational. The work is at once social satire and cultural critique. She draws from pop art and traditional landscape painting, as well as from the strategies of installation art. And don’t overlook the dash of humor in her approach. This is most apparent in Selections From the Library of Dr. Pohatten. In creating the library of a fictitious doctor she has outfitted his bookshelves with plump oversized books bearing titles like: Accelerating Zen Buddhism, Coping with Your Flashbacks, as well as Encyclopedia of Elective Surgery. Lowe’s simultaneously indulges in the simple charge of trompe l’oeil style painting, while advancing a new perspective on how development has altered the natural landscape.
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at Rosamund Felsen Gallery by Holly Myers of The Los Angeles Times
Judging from the length of her bio, which lists more than 40 solo shows since the completion of her graduate degree in 1988, San Diego-based artist Jean Lowe has been busy. Her exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, "The Loneliness Clinic," follows close on the heels of last year's "Empire Style," at the same gallery, but betrays little sign of exhaustion or redundancy.
The format remains more or less the same; both involve mock interiors fabricated entirely in Lowe's signature papier-mâché. But the milieu presents an altogether different set of issues.
"Empire" proposed an 18th-century French salon as a lens through which to view our own relationship to art, nature and landscape. "The Loneliness Clinic" re-creates a present-day psychiatrist's office, to poke fun at the elaborate and often misguided ways in which we go about attempting to understand ourselves.
The show's insight is in its humor and its humor in its details: the titles of the books on the bookshelves ("The Complete Guide to Insider Trading," "Sex After 16: Rekindling the Flame"); the headlines on the covers of magazines in the waiting room (Psychology: "Tough Love and Your Elderly Parents"; Good Housekeeping: "How to Escape from Quicksand"); and the especially entertaining "Doctors Notes," recorded on papier-mâché notepads, which hang individually in the back room of the gallery.
"Pt. has a smarmy familiarity w/ diagnostic words and phrases," reads one pad. "Unbelievable banality! Unable (unwilling) to be self-reflective," reads another, alongside three examples of explicitly sexual doodling and a note to "buy popcorn!!"
Sharp and deliciously witty, the notes comprise a curious sort of portrait gallery. They're exaggerated enough to laugh at, yet (like all good parody) familiar enough to be discomfiting.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, The Loneliness Clinic, 2004
For immediate release:
The upcoming exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery will be:
Jean Lowe
The Loneliness Clinic
November 20–December 29, 2004
In her second solo exhibition at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Jean Lowe will be presenting a new painting/sculpture installation entitled “The Loneliness Clinic.”
Mixing humor and pathos, Lowe employs the aesthetics of mid-century modernist design as a lens through which to examine the psychological state of modern-day America. A psychiatrist’s office is furnished with aggressively handmade Eames, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and George Nelson furniture, all of papier-mâché. “The Loneliness Clinic” juxtaposes the clear-headed authority of modernist design with our messy overwrought society. Modernist ethics collides with today’s condition on the psychiatrist’s couch.
Please join us for the artist’s reception on Sat. November 20, 2004 from 5-7pm.
Gallery hours are 10-5:30, Tuesday-Saturday.
For more information please contact Bari Ziperstein at 310.828.8488
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 at McKenzie Fine Art, NY by Stephanie Buhmann of The Brooklyn Rail
Jean Lowe, Installation detail of "Empire Style" (2003), murals and rug: acrylic on canvas, furniture: enamel on papier-mâché. Courtesy McKenzie Fine Art.
Based in San Diego, installation artist Jean Lowe draws much of her inspiration from Southern California’s generic suburban landscape, where candy colored stucco strip malls and endless concrete parking lots crisscross through various European architectural modes, disguising themselves as Disneyesque Roman remakes. By linking these outpourings of tastelessness and artificial splendor to the Empire Style decorative arts of nineteenth-century France, Lowe explores the psychological similarities between the American ego and the aggressive arrogance of the Napoleonic era. The projection and increase of power by means of physical expansion and the stylistic recycling of antique grandeur are the shared sentiments that tie together these two chapters in history books.
Marking her first New York solo appearance since a show at Holly Solomon Gallery in 1997, Empire Style, a body of work that was recently exhibited at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, parades Lowe’s fauxtastic recreation of a French parlor room, based on aesthetics that were favored by such famed neoclassical architects/ designers as Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine in their 1801 publication Recueil de décorations intérieures. Cautiously placed furniture pieces, ornate clocks, pre-romantic statuettes, and an elegantly patterned rug flesh out the detailed set, while three wall murals feed into the illusion of spatial depth. Though the garnished replica seems almost believable if viewed from a distance, a closer examination reveals the objects’ intentionally crude rendition. Employing inexpensive materials, such as enamel paint, papier-mâché, or acrylic on canvas, to reconstruct lacquered mahogany, gilded ornaments, and marble surfaces, Lowe transforms the once intimidating status symbols of wealth into easily accessible and disarmingly cartoonish props. While the untouchable becomes squeezable, an overall sense of kitsch meanders into the viewer’s consciousness, while the subjects of the wall paintings begin to look strangely contemporary.
The compositions, which were originally dominated by idyllic views of lush nature and the open field, have now been replaced with motifs of a Hudson River School gone mad, featuring picturesquely portrayed outlets of Burger King, Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, and Wal-Mart. Depicted from the other end of the parking lot, yet embedded in an epic mountain range, the stores transform into distant shopping temples, the magnetic destinations of browsing pilgrims. In this world, consumerism has not only invaded the natural landscape, but also sucked up its inhabitants. Though the multitude of parked cars suggests otherwise, any human presence is exempt from the scene. Where are the people who could object to the poisoned view, rebel against the bloodless scenery? They are to be found amongst the viewers. As soon as the audience steps into Lowe’s realm of Southern California suburbia, each member will be confronted with what shimmers on the hot horizon line: the foreboding prototype of a universal future landscape in which each patch of nature has been shopped up, forced through the industrial grinder, and paved.
Though the exhibition also includes excerpts from Lowe’s "The Library of Dr. Pohatten," an imaginary book collection of a fictitious doctor concerned with the "cultural pathology" of America, and "Apollo and Daphne," a series of papier-mâché casts referring to Bernini’s Baroque sculpture of the same title, Empire Style clearly steals the show. Part charming interior, part thought-provoking, stomach-twisting social commentary, yet including the necessary humor, Lowe’s work will leave you disheartened, enraged, and inspired, all with a healthy dose of sarcasm.
—Stephanie Buhmann
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at The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art by Alice Thorson of The Kansas City Star
"Issue" art took a backseat to beauty during the Clinton years. It also was noticeably absent in the aftermath of 9/11, as the country focused on healing rather than critical self-reflection.
So when the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art decides to devote its main fall opener to an artist whose work expresses a passionate social conscience, it’s a pretty good indication the cultural climate is changing.
In the present time of growing national discontent (over job loss, the economy, the deficit, the continuing cost of the Iraq war) it falls to artists and institutions to shift into an activist mode.
Encompassing enormous paintings, papier-mâché furniture and books, faux carpets and other decorative arts objects arranged in room-style installations, “Jean Lowe: The Course of the Empire” takes a piercing but humorous look at the consumerist driven course of the American “empire” and tallies its casualties.
The San Diego-based artist’s exhibit begins with a display of three huge American landscape paintings evoking the sublime Western vistas of the 19th-century Hudson River School. Whereas these earlier painters gave visual expression to the country’s belief in its God-given mandate to conquer the wilderness, Lowe’s landscapes suggest Manifest Destiny run amok.
Tract homes nestle cheek-by-jowl at the foot of the mountains depicted in “View from Laurentian Street” (2000). More houses, pavement and power fixtures despoil the wilderness in “Rancho Cielo” and “Sienna Estates.”
Two museum walls had to be made 4 feet taller to successfully hang the works.
A looseness and hastiness to the execution—Lowe painted them quickly, using as cues multiple photographs she’d taken in San Diego County—lends a certain urgency to these depictions. It also aligns them with the energetic gestural handling of the 1970s Pattern and Decoration painters. It is a movement Lowe knows well from her marriage to leading P&D painter, Kim MacConnel.
The P&D artists sought a populist art, and many turned for inspiration to the decorative and domestic arts—furniture, fashion, ceramics. Lowe shares both of these proclivities in her multi-part installation, “Empire Style,” which occupies a large gallery space to the right of her “landscape” room.
Here again, Lowe performs her signature strategy of inversion, co-opting an earlier vocabulary and infusing it with a topical contemporary message.
The title of the installation is an homage to 19th-century American landscapist Thomas Cole’s five-painting cycle, “The Course of the Empire,” in which the artist chronicled the rise and destruction of a civilization from its “savage” beginnings to its serene apex and on to its desolate end.
Lowe, too intends a moral lesson of sorts with her mammoth paintings of the contemporary Western landscape, shown all but obliterated by chain discount stores, fast-food joints and their acres of paved parking.
The prototype for these paintings are the French scenic wallpapers popular under Napoleon I, emperor of France from 1804 to 1815.
The “Empire style” of the period reflected the ruler’s identification with the glories of ancient Rome, mixing antique forms with symbols of his own power and authority—laurel wreaths, eagles and big “N’s”.
Lowe’s scenic wallcoverings form the backdrop for papier-mâché furniture and a carpet in the Empire style, a combination which slyly equates the United States with the vanished empires of Napoleon and Rome. The work gains piquancy against the backdrop of war in Iraq—an expression of American imperialism in the eyes of much of the world—and the Bush administration’s controversial record on the environment.
Guilt and guile.
Lowe gained art world attention for her works on animal themes, a concern not unrelated to her feminist embrace of the decorative arts and craft materials.
Cruelty to animals has been a feminist issue dating to the 19th-century anti-vivisection movement, which recent studies have cast as part of a larger feminist critique of progress and imperialist behavior.
In 1988, the year she earned her Master’s of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego, Lowe’s work was featured in an exhibit titled “Fate of the Animals” at the University of California, Berkeley.
The Kemper exhibit includes her “Gastronomique” (1996-2002), a collection of dozens of papier-mâché plates finished to look like fine china, each featuring a portrayal of animals we eat.
Pigs, cows, chicken, turkeys and sheep appear singly or in groups and sometimes are represented by a single eye—frightened, resigned, reproachful—shown in close-up in the center of a plate. Lowe herself is a vegan.
Her critique extends to our highly compartmentalized treatment of animals, a point also raised by the “Catherine Chalmers: American Cockroach” exhibit at Grand Arts. On the wall adjacent to “Gastronomique,” Lowe displays three vases adorned with images of cuddly pets.
It was almost a decade ago that Lowe’s animal works caught the eye of recently departed Kemper curator Dana Self, who included the artist in a group show at the Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wis., during her tenure there.
Self continued the relationship when she moved on to the Ulrich Museum in Wichita, including Lowe in the 1996 group show, “Subversive Domesticity,” before signing on at the Kemper.
“The Course of the Empire” would have marked a kind of culmination point for the two, but Self was no longer at the Kemper when this provocative and relevant exhibit went up.
Humor is one of the most potent weapons in Lowe’s conscience-pricking arsenal, as seen in her “library” installation, a room lined with bookcases filled with ironically titled tomes—Cachet—What It Is and How to Get It, How to Simplify Your Life, Family Values, Who Has Them—that reflect a broad range of social ills and human foibles, and the fads, buzzwords and bromides that infiltrate our daily existence.
“If you don’t want to preach, you’ve got to have guile,” the artist has said.
She endowed a Coors beer urn, made from papier-mâché, with a beerbelly shape. Painted blue and white in imitation of Delft china and featuring the company’s trademark landscape on the front, the piece takes aim at the corporate practice of using images of nature to sell the very products which desecrate it.
But it’s not just developers, corporations, fat cats and politicians who are Lowe’s targets. All of us are implicated in her critique, by dint of what we eat, where and how we live, and what we’re willing to countenance in the interest of comfort, security, and affluence.
“The consumers are going to get what they want and damn the cost,” Lowe observed during an interview at the Kemper.
And she was not merely talking about money.
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 at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art by Mindy Nancarrow for exhibition brochure
Jean Lowe: The Course of the Empire
Exhibition brochure essay by:
Mindy Nancarrow
Professor of Art History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
"First freedom, and then glory; hen that fails, wealth, vice, corruption." (Thomas Cole's motto to his popular description of the series, The Course of Empire)1
Thomas Cole, the father of the Hudson River School of American landscape painting, lived in a time when the wilderness was still a reality and nature was a force to be reckoned with. Inspired by Edward Gibbon's late 18th-century prose epic, A History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Cole represented the cyclical history of the Empire from its origins in the savage state in the primeval forest to its climax in the splendor of civilization, in five paintings entitled The Course of Empire. The splendid metropolis represented by Cole in his third painting in the series implies Gibbon's thesis that Empires bring about their own downfall through luxury brought about by prosperity and corruption. In the fourth painting, Cole showed the invading barbarians aided and abetted by an avenging nature wreaking destruction with gale-force winds. The series concludes with nature victorious over a prideful humanity whose accomplishments are now reduced to ruins.
For California installation artist Jean Lowe, on the other hand, the wilderness exists only as a concept and in the national forest reserves and parks. Humanity with its technological know-how has indentured nature to satisfy its ever-increasing need for raw materials, hydraulic power, and recreational spaces. In her epic-scale canvases in their museum-style installation, Lowe updates Cole and the turn-of-the-19th-century painters of the untamed North American West by representing a landscape desecrated by modern-day land developers in their all-consuming urge to profit. For the uncharted wilderness, her vistas substitute a land clear-cut and graded for building track houses and laying asphalt for roads. The ironic names given to the developments that lay waste—Rancho Cielo (Sky Ranch) and Sienna Estates—constitute a characteristic display of imperial nostalgia for the colonized "culture" (nature), according to anthropologist Renato Rosaldo.2 An absence of human and animal life in the bleakness underscores the inhumanity of the modular construction. Low benches in the gallery encourage us to contemplate that which we have wrought. In Lowe's bird's-eye views, only the opened skies as untouched by colonizers, although as humankind's last frontier, they too are doomed.
In the adjoining Empire Style gallery Lowe plots an evolving history of empire from the military conquests of Rome all the way to the present-day economic empire of the United States. Her papier-mâché Empire style fauteuils, or upholstered armchairs, console tables, and commodes quote the style associated with Napoleon. Percier and Fontaine's furniture designs published in their influential 1801 Recueil de decorations interieures inspired an official art that reflected Napoleon's nostalgia for the proud splendor of ancient Rome. Quoting a popular design preserved in at least three ornamental clocks in European royal collections, the faux gilded bronze Oath of the Horatii clock invokes the patriotism of the Roman Republic. 3 Based ultimately on Jacques-Louis David's 1784 painting on the same name in the Louvre, the three Horatii brothers swearing to fight the enemy to the death express the military virtues espoused by Napoleon. The Empire style ormolu armchairs with exotic griffins, meanwhile, recall the "barbaric" Orient that had been tamed by the "civilizing" force of the French. Arranged salon-style so as to encourage the refined manners and conversation of civilized society, the rich furnishings bespeak a rarified world in which he educated elite enjoyed the beautiful objects ornamented to recall an exotic East their imperial ambitions had extinguished forever.
Significantly, Lowe contrasts the antique furnishings with wall-size paintings of modern strip mall complete with discount retailers, fast-food franchises, and parking lots. Functioning in lieu of the ornamental wallpaper of a period room, the panoramic strip malls jolt the viewer into the immediate present. History repeats itself: In the massive block-like appearance of the furniture is the realization of Percier and Fontaine's maxim, "simple lines, pure contours, correct shapes replace the miscelinear, the curving, and the irregular."4 The block-like modern architecture of the retailers updates the Empire style to reveal the shared visual vocabulary of all empires. Imposed on a rocky mountain landscape, the modular sterility of the retailers is irrespective of the natural setting. An ancient temple complex back dropping an arcaded Starbucks coffee shop highlights the continuity of the imperial dream. Green awnings in the modern strip mall substitute for the greenery of nature; the spindly trees of either side of Target must be propped for support.
The large discount stores and franchises in Lowe’s paintings imply a world conceived I terms of buying and selling. This consumer-oriented world, whose beginnings in the gilded age Susan Sontag recreates in her novel In America, is one defined by freedom, as one of Sontag’s entrepreneurial characters puts it, the freedom to make as much money as one can. 5 In free-market capitalism nothing is sacred, not the wilderness whose boundaries are encroached upon to construct more track houses connected to strip malls, nor the animals that we breed for food and as pets, to fulfill our needs as consumer. In her decorative-arts room, Lowe directs us to consider the hidden cost of our consumption in 47 faux ceramic plates. Centering many of the plates is an eye, the ghostly conscience of an animal destroyed to satisfy our lust. In her ornamental urns, whose gargantuan proportions suggest the insatiability of consumers, nature in small panel paintings is required to endorse the very products that are destroying it. The capacity of humans to rationalize, to displace blame through sentimental gestures, is expressed in the small vases bearing romanticized images of pets. Distinguished from the rest of the animal world for their capacity to serve as companions, these memorials to beloved pet reassure our innate goodness in our national love affair with animals.
According to Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Cole in his paintings based on Gibbon, the Roman Empire fell when the enjoyment of private affluence seduced the citizens from an active participation in public life, when the citizens became acquiescent subjects or willing tools of despotic leaders.6 In her library of self-help books, Lowe suggests how corporate greed has subverted democracy, and how the big corporations have been allowed to assume a commanding role in politics and direct the nation to determine the American way of life. With ludicrous titles —Happiness is a Kitten, Fresh Ways with Lamb, How to Tell if Your Hunches are Sound—she implies the dumbing down of American culture familiar to us from the talk shows in which individuals with bizarre problems are presented to encourage us to conclude we are “fine” and “normal.” This dulling or drugging of the human psyche is most potently expressed in the cover illustration of Life in a Peaceful New World. A cascade of anti-depressants, mood elevators, and tranquilizers tells how a medicated America is able to overlook the real consequences of its profligate behavior to continue to plunder the planet and deprive future generations.
An off spring of the Pattern and Decoration movement, Jean Lowe seduces the viewer with her artful arrangements of handcrafted objects to communicate her social concerns. Characteristic of the papier-mâché medium, her bent irregular surfaces call attention to the handmade. Her loose painterly style stressed process, the individual choice that directs production. In her artful displays she suggests that beauty in this brave new world survives in the impermanent and handmade. Its seeming rarity is the result of an inversion of basic human values whereby the handmade is in museums to be preserved from extinction, and we live deprived amid a surplus of mass-produced commodities. Hand-fashioned from cheap newsprint, glue, and paint, her color-rich object d’art tell us that beauty is within the reach of all consumers. The individual creativity that is grossly undervalued by our modern world of scientific technology is as necessary to living as is nature and the natural world. The irregular and the misshapen, the unexpected and the serendipitous, Lowe seems to say, nourish the spirit and remind us of what it means to be truly alive in this world.
Mindy Nancarrow
Professor of Art History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Jean Lowe is an artist in residence at the Kemper Museum. This exhibition was curated by Dana Self.
Notes
1. The Life and Works of Thomas Cole by Louis Legrand Noble, ed. Elliot S. Vesell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 168.
2. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989),p. 69.
3. The Oath of the Horatii clock is found in London, Buckingham Palace; the Royal Pavilion, Brighton; and the Royal collection in Stockholm.
4. Charles Percier and Pierre Francois Leonard Fontaine, Recueil de decorations interieures (Paris, 1802); quoted in Louise Ade Boger, Furniture Past and Present (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1966), p. 202.
5. Susan Sontag, In America (New York: Picador, 2000), p. 101.
6. Eugene Y.C.Ho, “Edward Gibbon, Historian of the Roman Empire,” http://www.alumni.Caltech.edu/~zimm/gibho2.html.
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 at Rosamund Felsen Gallery: Press Release, Empire Style, 2003
Jean Lowe’s first exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery enlists an off-shoot of French neo-classicism as a lens through which to examine the realities of modern-day America. The artist’s painted papier-mâché chairs, bureaus and gilded clocks draw on the French “Empire Style” (1805-1815), a decorative movement of the Napoleonic period that emphasized the nobility of human endeavor and the majesty of the natural landscape. Commodified within the context of French interior design, these ideals were quickly caught up in a display of power and wealth, patriotism and propaganda ’ a display that reflected the grandeur of French high-class society and its authority over the natural, cultural and political world.
For Empire Style, Lowe turns the focus to contemporary America and the homogenization of the built and cultural landscape in this country — and as it is exported abroad. Lowe’s wall-sized paintings quote the idealized foreign landscapes typical of French scenic wallpaper, conflating them with the realities of American suburban sprawl. Whereas the viewer of French scenic wallpaper might traditionally find themselves by a river, enjoying a beautiful idyll, the viewer of Lowe’s works is placed in the midst of a vast field of asphalt ’ a parking lot ringed with strip malls and chain stores. Empire Style sees a resolution of the ideals of French neo-classicism in the debasing facts of human encroachment and the economics of modern suburban development.
Lowe will also display a series of painted papier-mâché works based on Gianlorenzo Berninis Apollo and Daphne, the well-known Baroque sculpture depicting the nymph Daphne turning into a laurel tree to escape Apollo’s unwelcome advances. Lowe will also show painted papier-mâché bookshelves and books from The Library of Doctor Pohatten.
Lowe’s work has recently been seen in one-person exhibitions at the Kohler Arts Center and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Lowe will be the subject of a one-person exhibition, The Course of the Empire, at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City in September.
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