Light Touch Lets Artist’s Message Linger Longer

SAN DIEGO —  Jean Lowe’s work abrades and enlightens wherever it’s seen, but nowhere locally has it been as coyly and effectively subversive as in its current installation at the Founders Gallery at the University of San Diego.

Lavish, gilt-framed mirrors, carved wood furniture and wall ornamentation decorate the foyer and adjoining rooms of Founders Hall, where the art gallery is located. In her installation, “Jardin Zoologique,” Lowe, a San Diego-based artist, has extended the hall’s 18th-Century rococo furnishings into the gallery itself, using them as vehicles for a critique of Western society’s subjugation of animals. In this arena of elegant comfort, her subversive tactics work brilliantly.

Great visual continuity connects the gallery with the surrounding spaces, but Lowe shatters any possibility of a continuity of meaning. Furniture, though rarely seen as bearing a message, does reflect the culture of which it is a part, and if rococo excess suggests the indulgence of humans at the expense of nature, Lowe simply turns this style on its head to expose the absurdity and cruelty of our relationship with the animal world.

In place of the tapestries that might have adorned an 18th-Century sitting room’s walls, Lowe hangs large, unstretched canvases painted with scenes of animal exploitation. One, titled “Mealtime,” sets images of animals eating in their natural habitats beside renderings or names of the paraphernalia used to feed domesticated or otherwise confined animals: pails, feed bags and plastic nipples. The dense visual structure of the paintings echoes the complexity of the tapestries they replace, but the message they send is not the same one of comfort, wealth and superiority.

On the gallery floor stretches a large, painted canvas “rug” with a central image of a human fetus wearing a “future good Samaritan” crown. Masquerading as decorative patterns and arabesques on the rug are diagrams of female reproductive organs and sperm fertilizing eggs. Along the rug’s border are images of homes and written phrases such as “good intentions,” “new order” and “compatible species.” Whether Lowe is simply pulling a decorative fast one or making a more complex statement about genetic engineering or reproductive rights is unclear. In this, the virtual low point of the installation, Lowe sinks into a humorless spoof against targets that are undefined and perhaps also less deserving of her challenge.

Elsewhere, however, Lowe keeps up an engaging tone, playfully jabbing at traditional attitudes toward species other than our own. On mirrors throughout the room, she has etched animals with adjectives commonly used to describe them. Baboons are labeled “funny,” and snakes “creepy.” The surface of one mirror is left free to receive the viewer’s own reflection, for which Lowe has etched a halo above and the proclamation “superior” below.

The chairs, too, are sheathed in images of animals exploited by humans in the name of education, entertainment, research and preservation. Circus animals in bows, hats and striped suits cavort across several cushioned chair backs, while posing elephants and a monkey on roller skates appear on smaller wall paintings.

As different, exotic creatures, animals admittedly have allure, but the fact that humans can control them--and inseminate, dissect and taunt them--without any discomfort is one aspect of their allure that Lowe clearly finds shameful. For all of the harshness of her judgment, however, Lowe’s approach remains accessibly light. She paints in a naturalistic fashion, retaining the palette of golds and deep reds that characterize the tapestry and furniture styles she appropriates, but she never gets bogged down in detail. Lowe cleverly sugar-coats a bitter message, making it not only easier to swallow but quite lasting in effect. Next time the circus rolls into town, or the zoo launches a new breeding program, those who have seen Lowe’s work are far more likely to scrutinize such events rather than blindly accept or savor them.

* Jean Lowe’s “Jardin Zoologique” continues at USD’s Founders’ Gallery through May29. Gallery hours are weekdays, 12:30-5:30. Another work by Lowe, the painting “Three Ring Circus,” can be seen by appointment only at Simayspace, behind ABC Books at 835 G St., through June 31. For more information call 544-6444.

ESCONDIDO--San Diego’s visual arts community is finally at a level of maturity where group exhibitions of local artists are no longer expected or able to be comprehensive. “Local Production: San Diego Area Artists,” organized by curator Reesey Shaw for the Center for the Arts, North County (formerly the Felicita Foundation for the Arts), does not beg the question of why some artists were featured and others omitted. It simply provides a showcase, much-needed in this gallery-starved city, for 13 individuals of varying interests and talents.

All of the artists have had some local exposure, and several have been the focus of solo shows in recent years. David Baze, represented here by four odd and dazzling paintings of figures in water, will have a one-person show at the downtown David Zapf Gallery beginning May 29. Jay Johnson, whose eloquent, sometimes elegant wall sculptures have been seen at the Thomas Babeor Gallery, will participate in a two-person show at that La Jolla gallery opening this Friday.

“Local Production” runs heavy on the familiar, but it still feels fairly fresh. Richard Allen Morris’s recent “Guns,” pieced together from wood scraps, tennis shoes, serapes, whistles, spiral notebook spines and other assorted debris, are as spirited as when he began the series in 1969. Visual oxymorons, they marry playful form with the most serious of intents. Poupee Boccaccio’s wall-mounted reliquaries, like Baze’s paintings and Johnson’s sculptures, also bear repeated viewings well, by continuing to reveal new facets of brooding melancholy and bittersweet memory.

Three works by Gail Roberts are among the most intriguing new works in the show. Each painting of a pond and its reflection hangs above an assemblage of objects that corresponds to the title of the work. “Open” pairs a pleasant, if conventional painting with a fan of rusted keys. In “Cut,” a long horizontal image accompanies an undulating display of knives whose blades have been covered by feathers, leaves and small animal spines. “Keep” juxtaposes a fractured landscape painting with three clear specimen or tackle boxes containing marbles, stones, beetles, pods and bones. The snippets of modest landscape in the paintings make graceful, respectful partners to the tools of humble activity.

Paintings by Leslie Nemour, Ellen Salk, Richard Baker, Greg Reser and Nancy Kittredge also keep this show interesting and rich. Works by Harry Bliss, Lucinda Luvaas and John Moros fail to carry their weight, but overall, “Local Production” is an admirable sampling.

* Center for the Arts, Escondido, 247 S. Kalmia St., through July 25. Open Monday through Saturday 10-4.

ART NOTES

The Balboa Art Conservation Center is one of four organizations nationwide to share a $100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. The BACC, a nonprofit art conservation lab in Balboa Park, will apply the money toward an endowment fund for conservation training, graduate fellowships, staff development and research. . .Los Angeles collector Frederick Weisman has recently donated 16 works of art to Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla. The gift, which includes works by Andy Warhol, Laddie John Dill and Don Sorenson, will be on view in the hospital lobby through May.