Elijah Wheat is enthralled to present a solo exhibition of multi-media works by Beck Lowry, their first at the gallery entitled “The Mountains Will Still Be Here.” The show will open at 3:00PM-6:00PM on Saturday 30 September and run through 5 November, 2023.

Lowry’s sculptures are elaborate wall-hung abstractions carved from assemblages of laminated plywood and intricately ornamented in mixed media. Largely biomorphic in form, the works draw language both from the natural world (mimicking the aposematic markings and structural coloration of flora and fauna) as well as from the rich inheritance of decorative patterning made by artisans for millennia.

Lowry calls works presented “painted weavings”, which evolve in a three-stage process: first a ladder-like armature is carved from plywood. Usually off-kilter and rectangular-ish in form, this armature is then painstakingly woven through with crochet thread to create a paintable surface.

Lowry writes “The work is born of a need to build, to exert myself through physical ritual, and to locate myself experientially within a lineage of ancestral laborers that includes ancient stone carvers, woodworkers, weavers, as much as it does makers within my own family who built houses, wooden boats, and fashioned jewelry.” By combining craft, like carpentry and weaving, Lowry bends their unique aesthetics to their wall works by highlighting a contemporary, ego driven display of art.

The artist uses craft to explore curiosities about the talismanic capacity of objects: to protect, to store memory & history, to embody incantations. Lowry’s desire, through assiduous and devotional labor, is to transform quotidian materials (plywood, salvaged curtains from their childhood home, unfinished embroidery from theirgrandmother’s collection, their wife’s worn-out kurtas) into protective objects, virile objects. That which can be mounted as a shield against unyielding despair over modernity’s broad environmental wreckage- of species, patience, intention, connection. As if prefiguring some unpracticed ritual for an Age of Grief. For when there is a time that humans are no longer on Earth making things, laboring to create objects, protecting themselves from harm, “The Mountains Will Still Be Here.”

BIO

Beck Lowry, (New Haven, Connecticut, 1980) work has been exhibited at Elijah Wheat Showroom, Newburgh, NY, Art Miami, Select Fair, Volta, and Greene Naftali and in Los Angeles at Klowden Mann. Their work has been featured in New American Paintings, reviewed in Artforum, and is part of the collection at Gateway Community College in New Haven, CT. Becca studied Economics at Smith College and lives in New Haven, CT.

Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) is a New York-based artist-run gallery and nomadic curatorial experience founded by Carolina Wheat & Liz Nielsen. Currently located in Newburgh, NY on the Hudson River in a 3000 sq/ft Kunsthalle. The gallery is named after their late son, Elijah, whose creative insight, righteous vision, perceptive being and stylistic voice for trendsetting embody the spirit that the Showroom honors. EWS artists are socially conscientious, politically engaged and reflective of a creative community striving to cultivate interactions and instigate conversations outside a commercial focus. We promote the diversity of artists' voices with contemplative messages while advocating visual art’s accessibility to all audiences.