ARTVIEWS

Jean Lowe's Loneliness Clinic

at McKenzie Fine Art New York by Edna V Harris

San Diego-based Jean Lowe’s new exhibition at McKenzie Fine Art (511 W. 25th St.), is based on the interior – furniture, reading material, floor coverings – of an invented psychiatrist’s office. The front gallery is set up like a waiting room, and as you venture toward the back you find the doctor’s desk, complete with a writing pad, coffee cup, and the requisite box of Kleenex.

Everything in The Loneliness Clinic is made of paper maché – crude enough to read as "constructed" and finished to a point just shy of realism. From a distance, they look like slightly-too-irregular found objects, but as you get closer they morph into globby caricatures of their real-life counterparts. This is what Jean Lowe does best. She reels you in with familiarity then gives you a giant dose of handcrafted pseudo-realism.

I’ve only known about Lowe for a few years. I’d seen her work online and was intrigued, but when I saw her last show at McKenzie in 2004 I became a loyal fan. She’s smart and funny and includes herself in her jokes – perhaps most obviously in the titles she chooses for her “books," solid papier maché objects with painted faux book covers.

An issue of Artnews has the caption "The 50 Tallest Female Artists" (Lowe looks to be nearly six feet). The bookshelves and pamphlet displays – again, all paper maché – are painted with wide brushstrokes to look like wood grain. The fact that everything is made of the same simple material makes each sculpture, however synthetic in concept, read as completely organic.

 

For example, a skewed stack of magazines titled The Feminist New Englander is tied with a cord and left on the floor. Several floor pieces made of sculpted Kleenex boxes (one is a tall tower and other, shorter ones make grid patterns of alternating pink and blue rectangles) are stacked and placed beside paper maché chairs in the waiting room. The abundance of Kleenex is a conceptual cliché (I imagine someone bawling their eyes out while the doctor admires his new designer paperweight), but it’s Lowe’s reminder that they are also the perfect building blocks for a sculpture that is so clever and appealing.
 

I cracked up reading the magazine covers on custom wall shelves and a group of pamphlets advertising everything from self-help for hair loss to coping with hay fever. Lowe plays subtle mind games with her viewers yet she never veers too far from her craft in order to make a point; she never jumps the shark. Repetition of form, subtle shifts in color to indicate shallow space, and artful placement are all in her repertoire, and she uses them to actually achieve her end product. She doesn’t try to be cute; when she is it's a byproduct. Perhaps best of all, she never sacrifices the form of the thing in order to make a one-liner. Her jokes are open, adult, and right on the surface, yet one admires her work first from an aesthetic standpoint before the humor even emerges.

The press release describes the show as exploring ‘the intersection of psychiatry and mid-century modernist design’ with an ‘inner sanctum of healing’ (the actual doctor’s office) containing replicas of furniture by Eames, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe. One faux black leather couch was so convincing to a drunken man at the opening that he almost sat down before a gallery attendant hollered, “No! Noooooo!” The couch had paper maché legs that surely would have snapped in half. I looked over at Lowe, but she didn’t seem worried. I don’t think she takes herself too seriously, making the work even more appealing and genuine

One incredible piece is on the wall adjacent to the doctor’s desk, which sits on a handmade oriental rug in the main gallery. The wall piece is a large, multi-tiered shelf full of Lowe’s replicas of Greek vases, antiquities, and ambiguously classical statuettes. All of the elements are connected to the shelf – Lowe makes each piece into one connected unit, then paints to delineate different objects within it – and from a distance, they appear only slightly out of the ordinary. Upon closer inspection a Starbucks cup shows up at one end, as if someone finished their latté and absentmindedly set the cup down. Meant to ‘poke fun at the supposed triumph of Western rationality and the authority of the classical education,’ the objects are arranged to near-convincing perfection, and reveal their thought provoking jabs at consumer society at the perfect moment – just as they convince you that they are fun, globby, painted sculptures

For more on Edna V Harris visit http://anonymousfemaleartist.blogspot.com

For info on Jean Lowe visit  www.mckenziefineart.com