Whitney Lowe is consciously pursuing a carefully nuanced interrelationship between modernity conventions by signaling the machine and manufacturing with a desire to exploit the material warmth and skin-like characteristics inherent in clay. It’s a play between objective pursuits – rigor, precision, anonymity, austerity – pivoting to pressure, weight and compression that are resonant of intimacy and flesh. Viewing the extravagantly constructed forms is analogous to reading the printed letterform; the eye understands the graphic outline yet lingers because of the precise manipulation – the turbid pleasures – of matter in the play of mass and void, the creation of taut edges and urgent lines. Planar surfaces stripped of any mark of the hand and unblemished by decoration convey desolate spaces of uninhabited cities or discarded objects of alien origin. The goal may be an aesthetic directness; yet, careful inspection reap deep rewards, revealing nuanced forms that layer historical quotations and material play.

 

Lowe began his career as a graphic designer. With the fortuitous meeting of luminaries from Cranbrook & California Institute of the Arts, he became one of the founding principals of ReVerb, a Los Angeles based graphic design studio that was awarded the “Chrysler Award for Design Innovation” in 1994, included in the prestigious ID40 issue, and featured in the British graphic design magazine Eye. In 1997 he was recruited as a creative director by the advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, and was responsible for such noted campaigns as Windows 98, the Microsoft Image Campaign 99, Diet Coke and most recently Starbucks.

 

It was 9/11, though, that compelled Lowe to rethink his ambitions & priorities. With his passionate interest and scholarly knowledge of 20th c. ceramics, he decided to pursue making, having never previously touched wet clay. Lowe remains committed in being at the forefront of the contemporary ceramic dialogue, and a voice–advocate and arbiter–that often grates with today’s craft conventions. His talk will offer some of these opinions as well as identify truths and strategies that have remained steadfast in the universal creative impulse.

 

His work has been recognized by numerous design publications and exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 1994 he co-designed the Book “Morphosis, Building and Project” that was awarded the A.I.A. book of the year. Whitney studied Architecture at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, received a BFA in Graphic Design & Packaging at Art Center College of Design, and earned a Post-Baccalaureate in ceramics from the Oregon College of Art and Craft. His ceramic work is in the collection of Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento California and NAU Art Museum, Flagstaff Arizona as well as numerous private collections.