'Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion' — The art of Jean Lowe

Ms. Lowe's above-titled show is up through March 15, 2008 at McKenzie Fine Art in New York City.

Ken Johnson featured it in today's New York Times, as follows.

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Jean Lowe: 'Achieve and Maintain a More Powerful Delusion

Here’s a book that some people might find useful: “10 Steps to Becoming a Published Author in Your Next Life.”

No?

How about “Napping: An Inexpensive Way to Stay Busy”?

Or “Craft Your Way to Mental Health,”

which has the picture of a heavily frosted gingerbread house on its cover?

These are 3 of more than 200 volumes [a number of which are pictured above and below] in Jean Lowe’s laugh-out-loud exhibition.

Based in San Diego, Ms. Lowe has specialized in constructing satiric museum-style period rooms out of papier-mâché and enamel paint.

For this show she has created a library of invented titles and displayed them on bookshelves covered with wood-grain-patterned paper.

Also made of papier-mâché and colorfully painted with a skillful, loose touch, the books imitate various genres, including self-help, children’s storybooks, academic tomes, law books and popular potboilers.

You can’t open them — they’re blocky, sculptural volumes without inside pages — which is just as well, because the covers are more than enough.

The action is mainly in the verbal and visual interplay.

“Get Thee Behind Me, Satan” shows a fork digging into a big piece of chocolate cake.

“6 Simple Steps to a Better Attitude”

is illustrated by a half-dozen drinks in cocktail glasses.

Some titles, like “Torture Preparedness,” are more sobering.

Some are self-reflexive.

In “Conceptual Art: Subverting a Commodity Driven Practice Paradigm,” which has a marked-down sticker price of $1.50, Ms. Lowe makes fun of her own intellectual pretensions.

While many of her books are individually hilarious, cumulatively they add up to something more:

a fun-house-mirror reflection of the American consciousness industry, warts, blind spots and all.

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Through March 15, McKenzie Fine Art, 511 West 25th Street, Chelsea, 212-989-5467, mckenziefineart.com.