Tim Lowly is a Chicago-based artist, teacher, and curator. His work has been widely exhibited in the United States
and Korea, and is held by multiple private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Grunwald Center
for the Graphic Arts at UCLA. For the past ten years Tim has worked for North Park University in Chicago as gallery
director, instructor, and artist in residence.
The work reproduced in this issue is about his severely disabled daughter, Temma Day Lowly, and the beauty he sees
in her. Tim has committed himself to making images that challenge us to look closely at things and people we ordinarily
do not want to look at. The work demands that we recognize the intense, inherent beauty in the reality of all that we
see.
The images that begin this issue are excerpted from a series reproduced in a limited edition book. They are what he
calls “technical hybrids,” combining different techniques. Tim made five life-size sculptures of
Temma—variations on one pose, suggested by the technical “problems” and “limitations” of
the media used. He then photographed the sculptures, and the photographic negatives were scanned to give the eventual
digital images a character not unlike etchings or fossils. The final images, printed on rice paper, were accompanied
(as they are here) by fragments of the poem “Gerontion” by T. S. Eliot. Tim offers, “The
fragmentation of the text is perhaps analogous to the thinking process of someone with severe brain damage. The text
fragments, the fragmentary photographs, the ’broken‘ sculpture: what are we to do with all this
brokenness?” The challenge to the viewer is to decide if what we see is truly broken after all.
To experience the entire TDL (Temma Day Lowly) series and learn more about the artist and his work, visit his
website at www.timlowly.com.
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