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New NEHMA Exhibit Explores Various Topics Including Consumerism, Feminism

Darcy Ritchie

Your Place in the Multiverse: Jean Lowe recently opened as an exhibit at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan.

The exhibit features 10 art installations from American artist Jean Lowe that use satire and humor to touch on topics such as consumerism, environmentalism and feminism.

 

Jean Lowe is a multimedia artist whose installations at the NEHMA include paintings, artist-made furniture and a short film where Lowe dresses as a fictional talk show host to discuss her works.

 

Bolton Colburn, the curator of collections and exhibits at NEHMA, said this is the first comprehensive museum exhibition of Jean Lowe’s work.

 

“We look to do exhibitions that cover some ground that hasn't been covered before," Colburn said. "So in Jean Lowe’s case, you know, just, she hadn't gotten a very in-depth look at her work by a museum before.” 

 

NEHMA is producing a publication for the exhibit that will be available in mid-September. The publication will include reproductions of Lowe’s art installations and two essays by art professors on the subject of Lowe’s work.

 

Marissa Vigneault, an assistant professor of art history at Utah State University, is writing an essay that will focus on the feminist aspect of Lowe’s work and how she uses humor.

 

“I was thinking about the way that, you know, feminist politics has been structured in the media as being something serious and means that you, you know, it already comes with all these kinds of expectations and roles and biases," Vigneault said, "but how her work is so funny, and it's funny, humorous, and the way that can lead you into thinking about really serious topics.” 

 

One of Vigneault’s favorite works of Lowe’s is her Portraits of Women, where Lowe recreates images of unnamed women made famous by modernist artists like Picasso. Vigneault said that Lowe remakes the painted images and then paints over them again after they’re displayed.

 

“Taking it out of that realm as a physical object, making sure it no longer exists, it functions then conceptually to ask us what's been erased, who has been erased, what names have been erased, what histories have been erased," Vigneault said. "And so she can do it over and over and over again, so that we don't forget, right?” 

 

The exhibit will be on display until Dec.12. The art can be enjoyed in person at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art in Logan and through a virtual tour online narrated by Jean Lowe herself.