Available Providence: Work by Constance Lowe

February 27 – March 30, 2024

Opening reception: Tuesday, February 27, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Artist’s Gallery Talk: Tuesday, February 27, 5:30 p.m.

My process has employed a variety of images, forms, surfaces, methods, and materials to explore an imaginative space in which contrasts and contradictions coexist to encourage a multitude of associations.  Available Providence brings together two generations of my work — pairing earlier sculptures with new mixed media works on drafting film — that emphasize intersections of the human-constructed environment and our conceptions of the natural world.

Drift Threshold (study 1), 2023, Acrylic paint, acrylic ink, colored pencil, leather on drafting film, 11.25″ x 9″

Pearl, 1998, Styrofoam, fiberglass, resin, acrylic interference paint, 52″ x 21″

In the mid-1990’s, with the support of my university and a residency in the ArtPace International Artist in Residence program, I was able to enlist fabricators to translate my drawn images into physical objects, designed to resemble manufactured or naturally occurring fodrms that suggest notions of containment and hidden or absent actions. Subsequently, I re-engaged with my original painting/drawing practice, arriving at its current incarnation in the Drift Threshold series. Here, painting, drawing, and collage are combined to exploit the translucent, two-sided substrate on which images related to transitory phenomena (such as aerial landscapes, clouds, and patterns in ocean foam and butterfly wings) are layered and “carved” into each other.  These contingent and shifting perspectives inevitably become explicit and metaphorical references to our larger, shared concerns of partitioning, erosion, instability, water, and weather.

Pictured above: Drift Threshold (study 1), 2023, Acrylic paint, acrylic ink, colored pencil, leather on drafting film, 11.25″ x 9″