Via Ventura 5
20134 Milano - Italy
Nate Lowman uses pre-existing photos, phrases, icons and idioms - from media reality, everyday life, his
own mind and memory - to craft a formal and strategic approach around a personal and cultural
identification with images, drawing on histories of collage, appropriation, and assemblage since the 1960s,
including Sigmar Polke, Cady Noland, and Richard Prince. Swiss Cheese and The Doors: A One Night Stand
is a diverse new group of works - paintings in pointillist alkyd and oil technique, a theatrical lighting
installation, found objects, and a new series of shaped canvases - built to shift between narrative themes
and experiential space.
Swiss Cheese
The shaped canvas is an invention which allows for both spatial and pictorial depiction. For Lowman, it
opens cultural and historical dimensions - grafting bulletholes or a scrawled Mickey Mouse hat onto a 3D
hunk of cheese - conflating or confounding an advanced joke with "advanced art". (Swiss) cheese, in general
and as painted here, could embody the linguistic forms of the polyseme (a word with multiple meanings),
the metonym (something not named in itself but called by the name of something closely associated with
it), and the cliche. Another series of canvases shaped like car air fresheners printed with the stars and
stripes exists in a similarly odd universe: pre-packaged with mixed messages, their inherent absurdity is
elaborated in Rastafarian or Italian flag hues and off-register Xerox dots.
The Doors
Symbolic of mundane or occult thresholds, the doors of Swiss Cheese... are literal and illusory, salvaged and
painted entrances and impasses. And like swiss cheese, doors signify broadly, spatially, and paradoxically:
closed, hidden spaces, partial glimpses passing through holes or glass panes. Swiss cheese on a mouse trap,
or a trap door, used to escape. "No one here gets out alive," Jim Morrison sang, his miragelike, flaming face
method-acted by Val Kilmer on the DVD cover for the eponymous Oliver Stone biopic. Kilmer reportedly
practiced Doors songs daily for six months in preparation for the part, requesting that he be called Jim on
set.
As a UCLA film student, the real Jim Morrison was influenced by but not disciplined in the psychologically
and spiritually charged techniques of European experimental theater. He rearranged his surname into the
amalgam Mr. Mojo Risin', altering preexisting elements to open up a heightened persona to chant,
channel, and dissolve into ether: the classical upper atmosphere, or the ingredient in Gamsol solvent, the
mineral spirit that soaks orange and yellow oil into linen.
One Night Stand
In Nate Lowman's images, mistakes and bad memories can be quiet. Stillness can be found in heated
moments or flaws major and minor. When rendered dot by dot, a waving drunk in a crowded bar looks
calm, or a dismal sex joke appears pure and condensed. His oversized inkjet prints stretched on canvas are
photos or scraps of paper enlarged to billboard scale, as if made to blend with impressive and looming
images in city streets. Scuffed and stained with paint, they are both concrete and associative, like language
characters strung together to form a detached and hallucinatory grammar, or an esoteric word-key, dull
elements combined to unlock a place beyond this one.