ART: Jean Lowe, Karen Carson at Bergamot Station Galleries

Karen Carson - I saw her fire paintings on silk a few years ago and marveled at her paint handling virtuosity. They are beautiful indeed.Any mis-brushstroke couldn't be changed on the permeable silk. In the rafters stuffed black crows and ravens roosted; black angels calling down the chaos of fire death upon the evil human race.

I loved the borders, a fearless "decorative" choice which suggested ethnic textiles and boundaries impossible in a fire's wild traverse. 

Her new work is witty, positive, muscular and very pop-gestural.
I find a child's delight and fascination in shiny powerful trucks and trains that we only experience in miniature.
  
Huge and expensive heavy equipment farm machines roll into the foreground prepared for modern agricultural tasks involving thousands of acres of genetically modified corn sprayed with liberal amounts of Round-Up. Noting this: the farm subsidy program remains the bloated corrupting reality distorting U.S. economic responsiveness. I love this sour counterpoint to those gay wheeled monsters, thinking that this kind of piquant needling is the only perspective to hold in our absurd world.

JEAN LOWE at Rosamond Felson Gallery

So you want a bitter laugh?  Still need more sardonic irony?  Bill Maher,Stephen Colbert, et.al leave you hungry?  Here - theses are superb lampoons of American self-help mania.  I sent the pictures to my sister-in-law without telling her they weren't real books and she was very disappointed because she wanted to read them all!

 


I've seen Jean Lowe's work in the past also.  Her "French castle" installation was the final and total criticism to be made of high decorative cultural production.   

 I can do a Marxist, class-war, existential interpretation for myself that's totally satisfying to me, even though I'm not sure this identifies or skewers current bizarro trends.

I'm struggling over the issue of the humorous graphic message. Upon first viewing the laugh-content is used up and then disposed of, humans' love of the novel being what is is. I just don't want to spend time making paintings that will get "trashed" so quickly.  Though this reality makes the point of this work even more powerful.