Artist Jean Lowe speaks at SDSU this Thursday

Jean Lowe at San Diego State University – Thursday, April 30 at 4:00 p.m.

Visiting artist Jean Lowe will present an illustrated lecture on Thursday, April 30 at 4:00 p.m. in Room 412 of SDSU’s School of Art, Design and Art History in conjunction with the exhibition animalkind. The lecture and exhibition are FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC. The exhibition continues at the Gallery through May 6.

About the Artist Jean Lowe’s work has been included in group exhibitions across the United States, as well as in England, Italy, Finland, the Netherlands and Korea. Her work also has been featured in over forty-five solo exhibitions nationwide, including The Evolutionary Cul-de-Sac at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Library at the Cannon Art Gallery in Carlsbad, and Love for Sale, currently at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica. Among her many awards, Lowe’s most recent was the San Diego Art Prize in 2006. Lowe’s work has been reviewed in important publications such as The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Art in America. Jean Lowe is represented by Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, and McKenzie Fine Art in New York.

About the Work Jean Lowe’s installation Selections from the Library of Doctor Pohatten (Les Livres Zoologiques) is a veritable menagerie of books that together present a vast array of human attitudes and actions toward animals. The sixty-four painted papier-mâché titles, housed on the artist’s cardboard shelves, range from vegan cookbooks to compendiums of animal research. In between are books about our sometimes-dubious friendships with pets and our appetite for poultry and beef, books about cartoon mice and questionable relations with sheep. Each of the books manifests Lowe’s witty and subversive interplay of image and text, while her loose and gestural paint handling creates a playful foil for the work’s underlying critique of human exploitation of the animal kingdom.

Image: Jean Lowe, detail from Selections from the Library of Doctor Pohatten (Les Livres Zoologiques), 1994-2007; enamel on papier-mache; courtesy of the artist, Rosamund Felsen Gallery, McKenzie Fine Art and Quint Contemporary Art; “Dairy Cattle Judging Techniques” and “The Cheese-Phlegm Connection” collection of David Guss; “Pink Scotty” collection of David and Jan Arnold.