Into the Heart of Buckminster Fuller with Benjamin Lowder

Benjamin Lowder, Director at the Buckminster Fuller Dome, will take us on a journey beyond Fuller’s material legacy.

When Apple Founder Steve Jobs created his famous “Think Different” advertising campaign in 1997, he featured architect, philosopher, inventor, and futurist Buckminster Fuller among the 17 iconic 20th -century personalities that included Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Picasso. This is an illuminating example of Fuller’s influence on the thought leaders who have shaped our world. Fuller’s influence goes beyond his 28 patents and 32 books. His material output was a byproduct of a life-long quest metaphysical quest to understand our relationship to Universe.

Benjamin Lowder, Director at the Buckminster Fuller Dome, will take us on a journey beyond Fuller’s material legacy and into the life experiences that shaped his transformative world view.

ABOUT BENJAMIN LOWDER
Benjamin Lowder is an artist based in rural Illinois and works as Director of the geodesic dome that Buckminster Fuller built on the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville campus. Lowder also serves as a Board Member for Buckminster Fuller’s historic dome home in Carbondale, Illinois. Lowder is an alumnus of SIU, which is the University where Fuller was employed as professor from 1959 to 1975.

“Myth, Math & Magic” is Lowder’s ongoing series of artwork. It is comprised of two- and three-dimensional assemblages created from reclaimed lumber and vintage signage.

“It’s like looking at an old country store through a kaleidoscope. And yet, references to religious icons and celestial phenomena suggest a sort of spiritual geometry, taking Lowder’s compositions beyond remixed Americana. They’re more reminiscent of the diagrams in illuminated medieval manuscripts.”

– Ariela Gittlen • Artsy Magazine

The advertising tropes of the vintage signs are deconstructed and reassembled into geometric patterns that break the magic spell cast by the advertising’s messages. These patterns are drawn from the geodesic geometry of Buckminster Fuller as well as the sacred geometry of phi ratios. The resulting works are magical wayfinding totems made to guide our collective journey. This work uses the shared familiarity of our cultural artifacts and makes them strange by transforming them into objects that recall a mystic lineage.

Benjamin explains that “in working with this medium of material artifacts, I see them as place holders for the culture at large, and through their remaking, they undergo an alchemical metamorphosis. This material is transmuted into new objects that signify the dreams of our ancestors and place them as signposts at the crossroads of the present moment.”

“These emotional and tactile works combine a direct expression of organic mathematics with the visual magic of the artist and humanity’s penchant for telling its own mythology into graphically bold tableaux of abstract rural poetry.”

– Shana Nys Dambrot • Art Critic / LA Weekly Arts Editor

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