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Subject: PALM DESERT BOHEMIA outlaw artist in a cultural wasteland From the 1960s through the '90s, artist Ming Lowe's Palm Desert home was an oasis of Bohemia in the conservative eastern end of the Coachella Valley. Could an important artist actually live in a place like Palm Desert? Lowe never let her location curb her artistic ambition. In the early 1980s She converted her modern 1960s Palm Desert home into a sleek art gallery and studio space with built-in cabinets, portable walls on casters and furniture she designed herself. She used the space to show her work, screen provocative films and as a meeting place for cultural outlaws like herself. Her gallery attracted an unusual group of desert celebrities and visitors that at various times included modern architect Albert Frey, mystic filmmaker Kenneth Anger, British rock singer Eric Burdon, actor Brad Dourif and surrealist Juliet Man Ray. Reclusive composer Ernst Krenek and his wife Gladys once attended a gallery screening. Fondly remembered by participants, Lowe's desert arts outpost was an unusual phenomenon in conservative Palm Desert. Inspired by the open space and solitude of the desert, her paintings and photographs deal with her connection to animals, people, rural life and her fascination with industry. Some of her earlier paintings and drawings from the '70s and '80s were about everyday life in the desert with her pets. An up close pastel portrait of a happy, well fed dog is drawn in radiant pastel colors. Her housecat, "Finch" is caught in one of the simple, graceful moves cats make. These pet portraits attempt tell us who the animals are and show us how close she is to her subject. In the loneliness of the desert, people rely on whomever is around. These animals are people she knows. In "Adam and Eve" sensuous figures beneath a bright turquoise sky lunge toward one another in an erotic dance, a snake dangles between them from above. The male figure, with a cat's head, has an open mouth and an extended tongue. The female figure, with the head of a tropical bird, holds between them a partially eaten apple. In a series of later works painted in black and white like a photograph, big pipes jutting out from a wall are decidedly "Female." A dangling cap chain is the bra coming off. It's an intimate, unguarded moment with sexy hardware. The austere, shadowy black and white paintings of plumbing works beneath dark skies, like "Female" and the double, connected pipes and chain in "Untitled"in the early '90s eventually led to photographic experimentation with more diverse and colorful industrial landscapes in large scale manufacturing and foundry facilities. After leaving her longtime home on the desert floor she moved to a house she designed in the remote Pinyon area above Palm Desert. Her neighbors, both people and animals, became her subject in a group of revealing, black and white photo portraits that intimately acquaints us to the otherwise hidden world of their everyday life. Chickens hang out at home, burros eat dinner, a gleaming black Rottweiler is soulful and pensive, the ring clad hands of a local sage rest in repose. In a photo of the rural neighborhood, flying saucer shaped clouds crowd the sky above a Pinyon pine studded landscape. This is a love letter to the neighborhood, land and inhabitants of Pinyon, Ca. The depth and intimacy of these portraits could only be achieved by someone with a strong rapport and connection to the subject. Her more recent work documents the mammoth metal and machine monstrosities inside large scale manufacturing facilities. The industrial scenery in these immense places is on a scale few of us ever see or experience. These huge interior landscapes of unfamiliar territory are like a spectacle on a gargantuan stage with dramatic color lighting. They have an ominous and sometimes eerie, desolate quality: a spooky air grill that could easily double for horror film scenery, Herculean chains and weights, a tool mysteriously buried in a wall, a pile of turquoise dust beneath a giant, rusted contraption. The bigger than life scale gets even more massive and muscular in Lowe's latest work, "Shift Change" which documents the people and places of The Port of San Diego. Here, some of the largest of man made objects and working spaces in existence are seen in dramatic detail. This is about colossal size and strength. There are illuminated bridges on towering cement pylons, immense docked ships, a huge suspended marine engine propeller, a metal anchor of staggering size. In "Kelco 1" a serpentine pipe rises up over a refinery like a giant anaconda. Many of these, like the factory works that preceded them, seem to be imbued with dreamlike, otherworldly color and light. "Shift Change" was commissioned by The Port of San Diego to document the San Diego Bay waterfront as part of their public art program. It is a moving and powerful portrait of the strength of the port, and the people who corral its waters, ships and cargo. A hardworking and committed artist, Lowe has created an impressive body of important work that deserves a much larger audience. |
