Dr Sean Lowry

Biography

Sean Lowry is a Sydney-based visual artist, musician and writer. Currently Lecturer in Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Newcastle, Lowry was recently a visiting artist/scholar at UC San Diego. Lowry has worked and performed nationally and internationally as an artist and musician, presented at numerous international conferences, and published broadly on topics ranging from contemporary art to creative arts pedagogy. Lowry is currently developing an online exhibition vehicle for practice-based artistic research called Project Anywhere.

Qualifications

• PhD, University of Sydney, 2004
• Bachelor of Arts (Honours), University of Sydney, 1999

Research

Research keywords

• Appropriation Art
• Art - intermedia
• Art History
• Art Theory
• Art at the Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity
• Contemporary Art
• Contemporary Art Criticism
• Creative Arts Pedagogy
• Electronic Audio Production
• Expanded Painting
• New Media

Research expertise

Painting, new-media, art history and theory, contemporary art criticism, electronic music production, art at the outermost limits of location-specificity, installation and performance practice, and creative arts pedagogy

Collaboration

1. Project Anywhere: Art at the Outermost Limits of Location-Specificity http://projectanywhere.net/

It is now relatively commonplace for contemporary art to transcend the spatial, temporal, geographic and technical limitations of conventional exhibition contexts. Meanwhile, artist academics still struggle with the problem of validation for practice-based research.

Project Anywhere aims to:

• Provide a vehicle for the dissemination of art at the outermost limits of location-specificity.
• Facilitate peer validation for practice-based research in the arts.

Project Anywhere will host projects from invited artists throughout 2012. During this time, we will build a robust international cohort of participating artists, reviewers, and partner institutions. The full blind peer reviewed version of Project Anywhere will be launched in 2013. Our peer-review approach aims to address lingering bias toward the journal-based paradigm for assessing the quality of research outcomes.

2. Ghostly echoes: ‘overpainting the wall painting’ www.seanlowry.com

Despite its inevitable absorption within the market system, wall painting once represented part of a broad desire to eschew the commodifiable nature of the art object by expanding the structural possibilities of painting as ‘idea’. In marrying the readymade qualities of stock paints typically used to restore white wall spaces following an exhibition, with a deliberate strategy of ‘concealing’ highly recognisable appropriated material, my 'overpainted wall paintings' aim to shift the material confines of painting beyond the wall’s surface toward a location that is literally inside the wall. First, I select a highly recognisable image within the cultural context of the exhibition site and pays a commercial sign writer to reproduce the image directly upon the wall. Second, via the careful addition of layers of the gallery’s own ‘house paint’, I transport the appropriated image toward the limits of visibility. It is here, that I seek to evoke a ghostly feeling of familiarity rather than an explicitly exhibited critical distance to the prototype image.

No longer limited to strategies of critical or ironic distancing, appropriation is now widely used to unearth low frequency emotional ties within commercial cultural formations. Unable to distinguish itself from cultural forms it once sought to critique, appropriation therefore no longer constitutes a critically active subject of art. Consequently, it is now a complicit, often tacit, omnipresent, and altogether convenient tool of cultural production. By actively concealing an appropriated image underneath three or four coats of stock white paint, such that the otherwise familiar becomes almost invisible, I aim to quietly inhabit the incontrovertibly paradoxical destination of critical practice within the institution.

Utilising the vehicular medium and structural language of expanded painting, yet with nothing but the ghostly echo of otherwise recognisable forms remaining visible, the unbeknownst viewer should initially perceive an empty space, followed by partial recognition and/or an uncertain feeling of familiarity. A strategy that is both formal and philosophical, ‘overpainting’ aims to unite material concerns with the invisible functions of thought. Being a practice of displacement that turns thought into form, overpainting provides (almost invisible) physical evidence of a conceptual exercise. Containing no independent essence, ‘overpainting’ relies heavily upon the structural specificities of painting – both as medium and as idea. It is here, within the specificities of painting as idea and at the very limits of its material visibility, that I position the practice of ‘overpainting’.

Fields of Research

Administrative

Administrative expertise

Research and Research Training Committee, School of Creative and Performing Arts (2007- present).

Course Co-ordinator, Creative Arts

Board Member, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney, Australia (2004-2007).

Teaching

Teaching keywords

• Art - intermedia
• Art History
• Art Theory
• Contemporary Art Criticism
• Foundation Studio
• Installation
• Interdisciplinary Studio
• New Media
• Painting
• Performance
• Sculpture

Teaching expertise

creative arts, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, art theory, art history, new-media, & contemporary art criticism