Jean Lowe at the Museum of Contemporary Art - Brief Article

Since the late 1980 Jean Lowe has been making flamboyant, sportive work motivated by outrage. While the targets of Lowe's declare s are fairly predictable--the manipulation of the landscape to suit housing and disclosure needs, the keeping of animals in zoo and their training in circuses--her approach is deliciously idiosyncratic in its marriage of conscience and levity. This present to view titled "The Evolutionary Cul de Sac," contemplateed Lowe's paintings, papier-mache sculptures and installations of the past dozen years, succinctly summing up her affects for the victims--animal, vegetable and otherwise--of our presumptuous, exploitative habits.

Lowe uses a vocabulary of independence and excess to satirize the human compulsion toward one as well as the other abundance and amusement. Her works are oversized, frequently bordering on garish. Their humor is prickly and relentlessly self-mocking.

The exhibit opened with a stunning installation of four fresh monumental landscape paintings (each up to 26 feet wide) upon unstretched canvas nailed to the wall. Lowe painted ornate faux frames around each image, giving the effect a stately, epic presence that belied the shameful practices showed within. The landscapes show yielding hills blunted, shaved, paved and plumbed to make way for cookie-cutter abiding-places in developments with names that pay false homage to the landscape they've just violated. Painted in restles raps 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 present to view veered toward the didactic--paintings that functioned as visual primers, tracing the unsavory paths through which such staples as ovums 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, harvests irrigated in the desert); ornate furniture on whose fabric surfaces are painted tools of measurement and science; and in the background, as wallpaper, painted images of real natural bewilderments like Yosemite, the Everglades and remembrancer Valley. Among the accomplishments we credit as our have a title to are the riches nature tenders as well as those we've forced without of her. Another installation, Gentleman's cudgel (1995), features painted "wallpaper" with views of a logg and consume ed forest--a habitat we've pushed our primate cousins without of--and a zoo and circus, which we've pushed them into.

Artifice prevails through every part of Lowe's work, as both self-conscious mode of speech and insistent lesson that our lust for direction over all living things has gotten ludicrously on the outside of hand. Six-foot-tall papier-mache urn charmingly heavy sport painted landscapes lifted from Coors cans and Lysol air fresheners. Oversized made of wood gallery benches made for the exhibit are painted with exaggerated woodgrain patterns. Lowe plays right into our perpetual craving for entertainment, flat as she exposes our arrogant efforts to use the repose of the natural world as our raw material.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

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