A Quirky Questioning of Society’s ‘Progress’

Jean Lowe puts the outrage back into outrageous in a terrific solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Flamboyant, furious and funny, Lowe’s work tears the sanitized, stay-fresh wrapper off everyday life to expose a variety of festering cruelties beneath the surface, namely the damage we do by positioning ourselves, presumptuously, at the top of the food chain and recklessly exploiting the natural environment.

She doesn’t rip apart the facade in a thrash of anger, but takes it down instead through a kind of parodic striptease, short on grace, long on a clumsy sort of charm; hardly sexy, but smart and ultimately very seductive.

The exhibition, like its title--”The Evolutionary Cul de Sac”--is a succinct summing-up of the San Diego-based artist’s work and concerns since the late 1980s. Several of Lowe’s early paintings here function as visual primers (kinder, gentler versions of Sue Coe’s slaughterhouse pictures) tracing the unsavory paths by which such staples as eggs and meat arrive in our kitchens. The sculptures and installations of following years are generally more nuanced, less didactic, full of righteous indignation filtered through a quirky sense of humor.

Lowe’s work has followed its own evolutionary course over the last 15 years (though the show’s thoughtful selection by the museum’s Elizabeth Armstrong and Allison Berkeley admits few laggard pieces), and no dead end or cul-de-sac appears in sight. The most recent work is among the strongest and freshest, even when it covers such familiar territory as Southern California’s suburban sprawl and the environmental cost of merciless development.

The show opens with a stunning installation of four monumental landscape paintings (up to 26 feet wide each) on unstretched canvas nailed to the wall. Lowe has painted an ornate faux frame around each image, giving the group a stately, epic presence that belies the shameful practices represented within. Soft hills are blunted, shaved, paved and plumbed to make way for a new rash of cookie-cutter homes in developments with names--like “Rancho Cielo/Ranch of the Sky”--that pay false homage to the landscape they’ve just sacrificed.

Lowe paints in restless strokes, moving on before the images get too lush or too finicky. The paintings end up as beautiful as they are confrontational. Thankfully, though, Lowe can’t keep a straight face, and the seriousness of her visual indictment comes with a few chuckles, in the form of three oversized gallery benches, built of wood, but painted in an exaggerated wood-grain pattern to give them a convincing aura of artificiality.

Lowe engages often in this kind of cartoony commentary. She sculpts 6-foot-tall papier-ma^che urns that sport painted landscapes borrowed from Coors cans and Lysol air fresheners. She hangs a wall of fake diplomas and awards, all fashioned in the same clunky papier-ma^che, to spoof one of our species’ favorite rituals of self-aggrandizement. Mirrors (one, for instance, with a crown etched in the glass) often hang in Lowe’s room-sized installations to further implicate and involve us viewers in her gentle tirades.

The installation “Gentleman’s Club” (1995) features painted “wallpaper” with views of a logged and burned forest--a habitat we’ve pushed our primate cousins out of--and a zoo and circus, which we’ve pushed them into. “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, crops growing in the desert); ornate furniture upon whose fabric surfaces are painted tools of measurement and science; and in the background, as “wallpaper,” painted images of real natural wonders, such as Yosemite, the Everglades and Monument Valley. Chief among the accomplishments we credit as our own is abundance, both the riches nature offers as well as those we’ve forced out of her.

Using the luxurious forms of domestic furnishings and decorative arts from an earlier era, Lowe sets a tone of elegance, only to subvert it with reminders of its foundation in our own arrogance, our fanatical lust for control over all living things. She furnishes some of her installations with books (sculpted in her signature style, in oversized painted papier-ma^che), pseudo-academic texts, instructional manuals and self-help guides ranging from the absurd to the perverse: “Learn a Foreign Body Language,” “Bringing Solitaire to Your Community,” “Your Career in the Recovery Industry,” “Living With Performance Art,” “Blackout Drinking--Does God Mind?”

Time and technology march on, but as a species we have stopped progressing, Lowe’s work convinces. Abundance has spoiled us and only ignited our greed. More, Jean Lowe, more.

*

* Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, downtown, 1001 Kettner Blvd., (858) 454-3541, through Aug. 13. Closed Wednesdays.