Steven Lowy is an artist and independent curator who came onto the art scene in the late 1980s with the Urban Imagery Project, a street art collaboration with master printer Pascal Giraudon. The two worked together to create colorful prints of manhole covers, enlisting fire departments and schools from South Central Los Angeles to the South of France, with Lowy documenting the process with photo collage and video.
Lowy continued to evolve his work in collage through the ‘90s while represented by Torch Gallery in Amsterdam, developing large constellations of collage and mixed media photos and, ultimately, large-scale, hand-colored panoramic photos.
Lowy’s newest work in ‘solar sculpture’ is an outgrowth of his longstanding interest in alternative energy. It is also in keeping with his business lineage — his family-owned and operated an electrical contracting firm for nearly 100 years. (Lowy & Donnath Electrical Construction, Inc., co-founded by Lowy’s grandfather in 1919 and still in operation today, holds license #1 for electrical construction in New York City). The son of an electrical engineer and interior designer, Lowy has applied aesthetics to solar installations to create solar structures that are pleasing to the eye while generating usable energy.
Solar Night Sculpture number four, titled Deco-Eclipse, is currently on display on the campus of amArtHouse. It sits on a cylindrical aluminum pedestal and lights up at dusk. Solar Night Sculptures also have a utilitarian sub-personality - they can power landscape lighting, small fountains and other manner of low voltage devices.
A high finish tabletop model, Sunpeace, is on display inside the gallery, along with earlier design models. Lowy is also working on designs for traditional solar arrays that include green plantings.
While these sculptures are not meant to replace solar arrays, they can be coupled with more traditional solar installations to help offset private or commercial electric consumption while meeting 1% for art requirements for public art projects. Future projects will incorporate not only solar energy, but also wind energy to facilitate energy generation both day and night.Item description