Constance Lowe
Graft
May 6 – 22, 2005
Opening reception: Friday, May 6, 2005 6:00 – 9:00 pm
Open by appointment: 210/392-8816
@
cactus bra SPACE
106 C Blue Star
San Antonio, TX 78204
210.226.6688

In her new exhibition Graft, San Antonio artist Constance Lowe presents colored pencil drawings on drafting film and sewn felt constructions that

continue her interest in the confluence of image and material. Like her familiar symmetrical drawings, these works employ complex shapes derived from ink blots and use strategies of reproduction to create hybrid forms. Unlike the symmetrical works, the irregular images in Graft are pieced together from various blot fragments, sprawling across the surface to suggest botanical or anatomical forms.

A unique aspect of Lowe’s work is its faithfulness to the specific contours of shapes created through happenstance, treading a line between abstraction and representation. She works from an ever-growing catalog of blots made with black ink on bond paper and over time has devised methods of persuading the ink to yield an unending variety of configurations. Each individual work of art results from meticulous methods of reproduction and fabrication, contrasting the purposefulness of labor-intensive construction with the enigmatic image.

"I am attracted to the notion that my images hang suspended between abstraction and a multitude of representations. making visible an imaginative state in which a clear identity or category is evaded. In the gap between abstraction and representation, drawing and object, dreaming and waking, of and out of this world, is room for something else entirely to occur and take on its own life."

Constance Lowe was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Since 1991 she has lived and worked in San Antonio where she is an Associate Professor of Studio Art at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her solo exhibitions include ArtPace, San Antonio; Thomas Barry Fine Arts, Minneapolis; Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis; I Space, Chicago; and the University of North Texas, Denton. Recently her work was featured in Double Vision: Alicia Beach and at the Phoenix Art Museum and she has a solo exhibition of drawings opening at Thomas Barry Fine Arts, Minneapolis May 21, 2005.