McKenzie Fine Art: Jean Lowe Exhibition

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467 fax 212 989 5642


	Jean Lowe: Lost Time September 7 - October 12, 2014
	For years, Lowe has created humorous and subversive installations that question intellectual and cultural institutions and societal assumptions. Using papier-mâché and enamel paint, she fabricates all the elements needed for her fully-realized interiors. In this exhibition, Lowe slyly critiques the way society assigns value, and to what, through the creation of a faux auction house showroom. Lowe’s showroom installation is decorated with paintings and digital prints depicting glossy auction house catalogue covers and posters. From fictional auction houses and websites such as “Roquefort’s,” “Heritage Holdovers,” and “PoliceAuctions.com,“ Lowe’s paintings illustrate items from sales which feature everything from fine watches, love letters, and important old master paintings, to manuscripts and ephemera. Some of the lots featured in these sales are on display on pedestals in the showroom, which has been decorated with a large-scale, painted Persian carpet (Teheran, mid-20th century) and a papier-mâché rubber plant in the corner. These include painted sculptures of an obsolete yellow pages phonebook and a volume entitled, “If God Loves Me, Why Do I Need a Vibrator?” Additionally, several of the items of faux ephemera are on view: a 19th-century broadside offering a reward for lost minutes and hours; a poster for a lost dog, again featuring a reward, along with an emotional appeal regarding the canine’s medical condition; a newspaper clipping about a man eaten by a bear in an Alaskan campground; a psychiatrist’s ironic notes on a patient, scrawled on a yellow pad; inter-office memos, and a variety of posters. Riffing on both Warhol and Gonzalez-Torres, in the rear of the gallery Lowe has created a showroom back office, replete with painted sculptures of folding chairs, a case of wine (Two Buck Chuck), a paddle and tape measure, and a wood pallet stacked with off-set lithograph give-away posters. In this exhibition, Lowe playfully transforms the banal into the magical and makes the rarified ridiculous by transforming commonplace items into desirable commodities, all in a satirical setting of high commerce. Through her painted and sculptured recreations the artist humorously questions what is real, what is true, what has value, and why.