Tristin Lowe was very involved with the setup for Black Holes and Rabbit Holes, the mid-career retrospective of the Philadelphia-based artist’s work, on view at The Galleries at Moore through March 19. This is typical for Lowe when he exhibits his work, to be so involved with the setup, but putting together the show at Moore was different than anything he had ever done before, mainly due to the large scale.
“This just happens to be more work and more everything than I’ve ever done before,” Lowe says. “At times I was just beside myself, in front of myself, behind myself, under myself and above myself. Lost in the whole thing.”
This show is the first time in the Galleries’ history that the entirety of the nearly 7,000 square feet of gallery space is yielded to a single artist. And it’s not just the size of the show itself that is on an enormous scale.
It’s hard to miss the inflatable replica of the moon, the car hanging impossibly from the ceiling and the bright red neon comet in Wilson and Graham Galleries. They immediately inform anyone who enters the front door that they have crossed into a space that challenges our understanding of reality. The different spaces in the Galleries informed the placement of the larger pieces in the show.
“The physical limitations of the space [are] not just limitations, [they’re] also an opportunity. What can I do in this space?” Lowe muses while looking at the huge door, Argonaut, in Levy Gallery. “For example, the door only stands there because it really can’t stand up anywhere else.”
When preparing work for a show or exhibition, he has a lot of advice for aspiring artists, especially after the experience of working within the unique space The Galleries at Moore has to offer.
“The space is the context of the work,” he says. “You might have been working on something on a wall or in your studio, and then you bring it [into a new space] and you can breathe some other air into it that you didn’t even know was there. Try to respond to the space and play with the space.”
For Lowe, it is important not just to think about the way your work is presented in space, but how people will interact with the work itself. This is clear as you move amongst his work in the Galleries. The pieces themselves are not the only surreal part of the show; the experience of walking amongst and discovering some of the pieces is a huge part of what makes the show so appropriately named.
“Play with how you perceive something, how you interact or come upon it, whether it’s around a corner, behind a wall or you see it right when you come in,” he imparts. “Is it something you want to draw people all the way up to? Is it going to be able to pull somebody from the other side of the room? When they go up to it, does it have the details or information to induce curiosity?”
Curiosity is something that drives the origins of Lowe’s works, many of which he says came about in unexpected ways.
“The car piece [came from] a very odd, unfortunate, surrealistic experience, but it was very real. It didn’t feel like it at the time.”
Lowe was coming back from a collaborative show he was a part of in North Carolina, driving up through Delaware around 9 o’clock at night, when he had a head-on collision with a car driving south in the northbound lane without its lights on.
“Somehow I didn’t think I was unconscious for like, a year,” he recalls about looking back on the accident. “I don’t know how I interchanged this reality…but I was obviously out cold for a while.”
After the accident, he bought the car back from the insurance company. “The car saved my life. I always loved that car.” He was invited to participate in a show at Vox Populi, and decided to see what he could do with the car, spending about a month preparing it for the space, cutting off the parts that had been damaged by the accident and figuring out how to move it in to the limited space there. He had hoped to be able to put it up on the ceiling, and they were able to make it happen.
“It ended up being physically, emotionally and spiritually the most cathartic thing I’d ever done.”
Another piece that came about through Lowe’s curiosity about materials is Frosty. The piece is based on an idea that originated during his many walks by the hospitals near the Mass Art campus, where he went to school, and seeing liquid nitrogen tanks covered in frost.
“There was this wonderful contrast between this repetitive structure, a grid of aluminum, and the organic aspect growing on it.” He was enamored with the concept and had it in his mind for a long time.
“Frosty came about by attempting to do something with [that concept], and became a metaphor for what I think we do with art: we try to breathe life into something. The artwork is the materials and their inherent qualities, [and also] our ideas and the relationship we have with them, and hopefully it ends up being more than the sum of its parts.”
