Dr Sean Lowry

Biography

Dr Sean Lowry holds a PhD in Visual Arts from The University of Sydney. Lowry's thesis; The after-party: The retreat and concealment of strategic appropriation in contemporary art (2003), was supported by a series of conceptually based visual and audio works. Lowry is an active visual artist, writer, academic and electronic composer. He has performed and exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally, presented his research at numerous international conferences, and published broadly on topics related to contemporary art and culture. Lowry's conceptually driven creative practice employs strategies of ‘concealed’ quotation designed to both evoke ghostly feelings of familiarity and transcend specific recognition. His practice-based research outcomes have included ‘overpainted’ wall paintings and installations, ‘expanded painting’ projects, subliminally inflected commercial music production, immaterial and site-specific strategies such as ‘reverse marketing’, and experimental sound and video works. Lowry's published writing has appeared in numerous international and national journals, and in several edited volumes.His primary areas of research focus are concerned with creative arts pedagogy and supervision, the paradoxical nature of artistic production in the wake of postmodernism, art after appropriation, copyright in the digital age, aesthetics after conceptualism, and the role of sound in visually centred cultural formations. Lowry's most recent initiative is a new global peer-reviewed exhibition model in which the role of curator is replaced with the type of peer review model typically endorsed by a refereed journal. Emphasising artistic projects situated outside conventional exhibition contexts, Project Anywhere ( http://projectanywhere.net/) is dedicated to the dissemination of advanced practice-based artistic research at the outermost limits of location-specificity.

Qualifications

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

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Research

Research keywords

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

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, conceptual art, and creative arts pedagogy

Collaboration

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

Project Anywhere is an exhibition space encompassing the entire globe in which the role of curator is replaced with the type of peer review model typically endorsed by a refereed journal. Given that it is now relatively commonplace for artistic research to occur outside conventional exhibition environments, and given that artist academics are still struggling with the problem of validation for practice-based research outcomes, Project Anywhere offers an innovative solution. Serving as a publication vehicle for artistic projects unbounded by the physical limitations of conventional exhibition contexts (i.e. art in remote geographical locations, technically specialised contexts, and even imagined spaces), Project Anywhere is dedicated to the dissemination and validation of art at the outermost limits of location-specificity. Project Anywhere has been developed in close consultation with an international editorial and advisory committee is partnered with Parsons The New School for Design, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, The University of Sydney, The University of Newcastle, Auckland University of Technology, and The University of Melbourne.

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

Despite its inevitable absorption within the market, 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 recognisable appropriated material, my "overpainted wall paintings" aim to shift the material confines of painting beyond the wall’s surface and toward a location that is literally inside the wall. First, by selecting a recognisable image within the specific cultural and historical context of the exhibition site, and then paying a commercial sign writer to reproduce the selected image directly on the wall, and second, by carefully transporting that image via the addition of partially transparent layers of stock ‘house paint’ toward the limits of visibility, I seek to evoke a ghostly feeling of familiarity rather than an explicitly exhibited critical distance to the prototype. 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 no longer constitutes a critically active subject of art. Consequently, appropriation is now a complicit, often tacit, omnipresent and convenient tool of cultural production. By actively concealing an image underneath three or four coats of stock white paint, such that the familiar becomes almost invisible, I seek to consciously inhabit the paradoxical destiny of critical practice. Utilising the vehicular medium and structural language of expanded painting, and with nothing remaining but a ghostly echo of otherwise recognisable forms, the unbeknownst viewer should initially perceive an empty space, followed by either partial recognition or an uncertain feeling of familiarity.

Fields of Research

Code	Description	Percentage
190502	Fine Arts (Incl. Sculpture And Painting)	50
190100	Art Theory And Criticism	25
190504	Performance And Installation Art	25

Memberships

Body relevant to professional practice.

• Member - Artspace Visual Arts Centre Ltd
• Member - College Art Association (US)
• Member - Australasian Performing Rights Association
• Member - Phonographic Performance Company of Australia

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Administrative

Administrative expertise

Convenor of Honours, Creative and Performing Arts, School of Creative Arts (2013-)

Research and Research Training Committee, School of Drama, Fine Art & Music (2007- 2012)

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

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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