Nate Lowman: October 1, 2017

Titled after the date of a mass shooting that took place on October 1, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada, where a gunman attacked civilians attending the Route 91 Harvest country music festival, resulting in fifty-nine deaths, “October 1, 2017” presents a new series of paintings by Nate Lowman, begun in 2018, based on the released photos of the creme scene. The followed investigation of the crime yielded no identifiable motive, the police released photos of the Mandalay Bay hotel room and surrounding area where the gunman carried out his attack. Lowman, who was born in Las Vegas, was drawn to the perfunctory quality of the photographs as much as to their uneasy sense of timelessness and placelessness, began translating the images, one by one, into paintings, in part as an attempt to grapple with the unanswerable questions posed by the shooting.