Beck Lowry’s sculptural paintings act as vessels. But what do they hold? Memory? Sensation? Labor? Five such pieces comprise “First Storm,” at Yossi Milo Gallery, the artist’s first New York solo show. In its earthen palette and irregular construction, the work resembles ceremonial objects, though the associated eras and cultures remain mysterious. For understanding the art’s function and what it contains, Lowry’s process is key.
Over a substrate of wooden rungs, Lowry crochets a canvas thread by thread. They make room for this meditative act in daily life outside the studio, weaving together the pleated structure with company present or alone. Somewhere between priming and painting on the surface, Lowry may strew a few scraps of fabric onto it, providing a playful primer, something to respond to with oil paint. Once the composition emerges, in bright pastel shapes, Lowry crafts a unique frame around it.
In finishing a piece, Lowry fine-tunes the relation between the painting, its surface, and the frame – collectively, its armature. Consider the tensions in Lost at Home. The red flowers painted above a scrap of cloth – their grandmother’s napkin, I learned – may seem quaint, but the rib-like outer structure deepens the work. Cross-sectioned shells dot the frame, entrenching a sense of biologically embedded remembrance. Lowry deftly carries the painting’s crimson and sea-green onto the bony exo-skeleton, giving the illusion of light reflected on mother-of-pearl. In turn, they continue the frame’s line back into the painting, creating a stack of stilted interlinking ellipses that visually recapitulate the artist’s process.
Note also the textured elements of No Exit to Mars. The painting’s striated fibers appear to extend into the incised lines of the wooden frame. The entire object looks like a shawl grafted onto clay. At the same time, the imagery’s action suggests a skyward trajectory. The bottom flower seems to rise from behind the Prussian blue silhouette painted on the frame, which curves upward in crescents, its dark tones accentuating each horizontal rung of the underlying substrate. The recurrent circles ascending the center-left column suggest a sun and moon in a perpetual dance. The result: a cosmic shrine within an earthen relic.
The embedded warps and refractions reflect the fusion between Lowry’s modern painting style and a deeper tradition of global craft. Notwithstanding the connections between colonialism and Modernism, a Western appreciation of indigenous cultures did spawn some notable art in the twentieth century, from Gauguin to the Talking Heads. The color scheme and rhythmic textures, respectively, remind me of them, and Lowry’s manipulation of plywood to resemble adobe or bone seems palpably cross-cultural. Lowry is white and did not name any specific customs as sources or inspirations for their work. But weaving, carving, and painting arise across eras and peoples. “First Storm” reflects this global canon in objects that showcase the human hand as a link to the natural world and collective psyche.
