Jean Lowe with HereIn
Closeout Priced from the series Love for Sale, 2009, enamel on panel, 47.5 x 47.5 in.
[Image description: A brightly colored painting that merges the interior of an American supermarket with the architecture of a lavishly decorated European palace. Aisles of colorful cleaning products are framed by marble columns, an undulating mezzanine, and a frescoed ceiling.]
For more than 35 years, Jean Lowe has been making art imbued with a proprietary blend of wry wit, visual seduction, and incisive cultural critique. Working in sculpture, painting, and installation, Lowe draws us into elaborate reconstructions of our own value systems, empowering, entertaining, and implicating us all at once. Lowe talks with HereIn’s Contributing Editor Jordan Karney Chaim about humor, sneak attacks, and the power of objects.
HereIn: I thought that we could start at the beginning. When did you decide to become an artist?
Jean Lowe: I was in grad school at UCSD—it was written for me, what I was going to do, I just had to do it in a way that felt like a contribution to issues and conversations that I thought were important. UCSD at that time was dominated by image and text. Like, really austere, conceptual work. And I wasn’t getting a lot of support. Actually, I was getting a lot of negative input, which ended up being really great for me. It enabled me to define myself in opposition to, rather than just being supported. And of course, the conceptual emphasis was great.
Master Bedroom, 1990, mixed media installation using repurposed found furniture
[Image description: An installation in a room with off-white walls and a hardwood floor. Three fabricated, painted rugs lay on the floor, two of which anchor furniture groupings on the right and left walls. Against the back wall is a large bed with an intricate headboard and red bedspread with floral design elements. Each wall contains a large red mural with inset vignettes of pastoral scenes.]
HereIn: I discovered that you wrote your Master’s thesis on paintings and painted furniture, and I’m wondering how you landed on that subject and how it’s shifted as your career has progressed.
Lowe: I was searching for a way to make art that didn’t feel elitist. That was welcoming, but still carrying on with solid content. Borrowing from the language of the home seemed smart to me because I was talking about our behaviors. Our actions are all basically political—what we eat, what we buy. So painting about animal agriculture using the structure of an antique wallpaper that pictured romanticized images of animals, taking a pattern that maybe existed in some form in real life but altering it slightly, made sense to me. And I quickly began to include three-dimensional elements.
There was a couch sitting outside of my studio and one day I just pulled it in, covered it with gesso, and thought why not? It’s funny because Kim [MacConnel]—I hadn’t met him yet, but that was very much what he made his career out of in the beginning. I felt domestic tableaux could carry the content really well. They were a good scaffold for talking about our behavior.
Originally, I was actually painting on real furniture, and eventually I switched to making papier mâché, just facsimiles.
Accomplishments of Man, 1992, mixed media installation
[Image description: A room-sized installation of a rococo salon. Patterned red walls, ornate period furniture, a carpet, and large paintings in gilded frames contain imagery showing humankind's "triumphs" over nature.]
HereIn: Was there something about existing furniture that just wasn’t the right language?
Lowe: The real furniture was ultimately just too real. What magic to envision an empire style-chair — and boom! You’ve got it out cardboard. I would even trick myself. I would turn around from doing something and think, “oh there’s a real chair!” And have to stop myself from taking a seat.
HereIn: I want to ask about your attention to the notion of display. Everything that you make seems to have an awareness of presentation as a mediating force, whether it’s books on a shelf, or items in a store, or these ornate rooms. Can you talk a bit about your engagement with the politics of display?
Lowe: I think that’s really just about subverting the expectation of what an artwork is, with all of its authority, not needing any kind of real-world grounding. It’s always been important to me to ground my work in a format that is somehow familiar. So it’s not, “oh this an artwork, this is royalty.” It’s like, “this is real-world familiar, and also an artwork.”
When I was a little kid, the first time I saw a wrapped Christo piece — a chair that was all tied up — it just infuriated me. And I loved that. But it infuriated me that such a ridiculous object could proclaim itself an important artwork. I certainly respect such work now, and the fact that it could get a kid so worked up speaks to its magic.
HereIn: So, when you put things into a context that is recognizable as everyday life, you are actually trying to knock art of its pedestal a little bit?
Lowe: Yeah, and also do a bit of a sneak attack.
Carpet Showroom, 2019, casein on cloth mache, enamel housepaint on canvas. Photo: Brian Lockhart
[Image description: A room containing twelve Persian-style carpets. They are vividly colored and patterned. A large carpet covers the floor, some hang on the wall, several are crumpled at the base of the walls, and three are rolled and leaning in the corner.]
HereIn: I love this idea of the sneak attack. Because even though your images are generally devoid of people, we as viewers are implicated in the spaces you create. We become part of the story when we enter an installation, as we consume these images of our own consumption.
Lowe: It is important to me to have the viewer be almost an actor in the piece. Starting way back when I began to do the carpets on the floors, I wanted to physically change the way you relate to the piece, which might include walking on it.
HereIn: You are working with the tension between welcoming people in, but also calling them out.
Lowe: That’s why I think humor is important. And visual seduction. So that you can get a couple jabs in. Or it’s really fine with me if someone just appreciates the humor, enjoys the piece, and that other stuff just washes over. Because I do think that entertainment is valuable in and of itself.
Empire Style, 2003, mixed media installation. Photo: Grant Mudford
[Image description: A room-sized installation with early 19th-century Empire style decor. Gilded chairs flank a decorated wooden cabinet, and above them is a wall mural depicting a sprawling Southern California strip mall. The mall’s parking lot is lined by businesses like Bed, Bath, & Beyond and Burger King, which are set against a landscape dominated by snow-capped mountains.]
HereIn: Yes, let’s talk about the idea of value. Much has been written about your ongoing commentary on how we assess or assign value. And as we’re talking I can see a resonance with the democratization of art and making things less precious, as well as a lot of capitalist and consumerist critique in the work. How did you start thinking about that, and how has it evolved?
Lowe: I think that was an issue for me just as a person. I’ve always felt strongly about the power that things had—and I’ve also resisted that power. For me, sentimental value has always been a sort of tug-of-war.
The first painting I did as an undergraduate was this sort of altar, and I painted all these different little objects that I had that were important to me. And I thought, “well, if I paint them, then I can get rid of them.” So somehow that’s remained a stick in my spokes.
HereIn: It’s so interesting that this investigation of value really begins with sentimental value.
Lowe: I think so. The seduction and trying to resist it… but I did end up throwing that painting away!
HereIn: [Laughs] But do you have the objects?
Lowe: No [laughs].
HereIn: I didn’t expect the exploration of value to begin with the sentimental. That’s a very hard thing to hold on to. And it’s also unpredictable and inconsistent—like, what carries sentimental value for me isn’t going to be the same for you.
Auction Page (Lost Time), 2013, inkjet print on poly-metal, 33 x 21 in. Photo: Grant Mudford
[Image description: An auction catalogue page for a fictional 19th-century broadside printed with text offering a reward for the return of "lost time." Below the broadside is a description of the item, a condition report, and price estimate.]
Lowe: That’s sort of what I explore in the installation, Lost Time. Really random items, paper ephemera, and then assigning them different values.
HereIn: How did you think about the values you assigned them?
Lowe: I tried to price them like an expert. I have a bunch of auctions catalogues, so I took my cues from there. Although, how do you price a phone book?
HereIn: For that project, was all of the ephemera created? Or was some of it found?
Lowe: For example, I made a digital broadside that looks like it could have been from the early 1900s. Then I turned it into an auction page with the cursory details below it. And then I hand-painted the thing that I’d made digitally, without the page context. I intentionally want to confuse the status of the thing or the object. I want to avoid allowing the viewer to say, “oh I get it, I get the angle. I get the process here.” Unsteady ground is interesting!
Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion (detail), 2007, enamel on papier mache. Photo: Grant Mudford
[Image description: A photograph of two shelves of a wooden bookshelf. They each contain three colorful papier mâché books with titles such as, "Anxiety: the unexploited weight loss tool” and “Just Ask God: washboard abs for life.”]
HereIn: Something else I am curious about the dialogue around the pursuit of self-improvement in your work. Our society places an intrinsic value on self-improvement, but it’s also something that we can supposedly purchase, right? How do you think about it?
Lowe: I am looking at self-help as a kind of escapist fantasy. Like, focusing on a perceived beer belly, when there are actually so many pressing and serious issues to think about. We cater to our huge, fragile, prickly egos to the exclusion of really thinking about important things. And with the beauty products, it’s also about women buying the line, to our detriment. It’s humor and visual seduction and a bit of rage all braided together.
Roll Back from the series Love for Sale, 2009, enamel on panel, 36 x 36 in.
[Image description: Three American supermarket aisles stocked with vividly colored foods and home supplies are arranged within an ornamented rococo interior. A heavenly scene is painted on the ceiling.]
HereIn: You are able to tie very contemporary representations of our consumer culture back to history. You explore different manifestations of that acquisitive desire through the ages. So, I guess I could ask then, what is your relationship to art history?
Lowe: Early on for example, I felt like the visual excess of the rococo was a fitting language to borrow to talk about contemporary mores. It’s been inspiring for me to think about what different periods of art and design say about culture and how those vocabularies might be deployed for contemporary conversations.
I did have a somewhat intense, surprising experience at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin looking at the Monforte Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes. It’s from around 1500, a manger scene, with the townspeople winding around to pay homage. Mary is holding the baby, and I actually kind of got down a little bit to get a better view, and that baby looked me right in the eye! I got a chill. I thought, how amazing that this artist can speak so viscerally to me over 500 years. But I wouldn’t say that informs my practice. I find inspiration in looking at images of the Dutch Golden Age right now. I’m really interested in the still lives because of course they’re beautiful, but they also deal with the presentation of wealth and abundance — people showing off! — and mortality—dovetailing with the content that drives me.
HereIn: I don’t think that your reaction to the Altarpiece is disconnected from your practice. You are also connecting with people, maybe not through direct eye contact, but through the sneak attack, through humor. You are eliciting a similar kind of primal emotional response.
Lowe: That’s a nice way to think of it.
The Loneliness Clinic, 2004, mixed media installation. Photo: Grant Mudford
[Image description: A room-sized installation made to look like a psychiatrist's office and waiting room. One wall is lined with bookshelves containing decorative objects, books, and large bottles of pills. The adjoining wall is covered in diplomas and certificates. The center of the room contains mid-century furniture (chair, ottoman, sofa, and desk), a wastebasket, tissue box, and an ornate rug.]
HereIn: I think humor is a very powerful connective tool.
Lowe: And it’s really a delight to be in a museum or gallery and just hear people chortling. The work is definitely trying to figure out how to communicate.
HereIn: Communication across time—
Lowe: That’s something I’m denying myself by working in the materials that I’ve chosen, and that’s on purpose too.
HereIn: You mean your materials will degrade?
Lowe: Well it’s not marble or bronze! And that relates back to the idea of value. My choice of materials is inherently questioning and playing with the idea of value. Not that it’s going to decompose or anything, but choosing materials like newspaper and cardboard is an intentional part of the work’s content. I am all about the present.
HereIn: It’s remarkable how you continue to advance your thinking and your exploration of all of these interconnected ideas across so many bodies of work.
Lowe: That’s part of the challenge for sure—to keep the process interesting as well as the work itself.
[This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.]