Your Place in the Multiverse

Jean Lowe

June 19 - December 12, 2021

American artist Jean Lowe’s (b. 1960) work revolves around the intersection of popular culture, environmentalism, commerce, politics, and art history. Your Place in the Multiverse: Jean Lowe is a survey of her work drawn from the past seventeen years featuring many of her most important installations.

Lowe employs wit and satire to create work that is both entertaining and seductive as well as intellectually provocative. Lowe is an American pop/conceptual multimedia artist whose work carefully and humorously unpacks the ironies and challenges of our 21st-century culture.

With works dating from 2003–2020, the exhibition consists of ten separate installations that are primarily comprised of household craft media such as papier-mâché and paint coupled with a sophisticated, literary use of language and a loose painterly style. Room-sized and incorporating artist-made furniture, rugs, and even a piano, these beautifully staged installations are often overwhelming, playing both on sensory overload and the irony of abundance as presented daily in our consumer culture.

Through her work, Lowe references European art, in particular German Baroque interiors as well as the French Empire style with its exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style. By conflating the Empire style with the stylistics of American consumer culture and big box store marketing, Lowe offers up a striking, thoughtful and revealing comparison of cultural contexts.

Support for this exhibition and publication has come from Kim Robert MacConnel and the Utah Division of Arts and Museums.  Additional support comes from the Baugh Motel, Surestay Collection by Best Western, Logan, Utah.