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There are many reasons to be suspicious of the art that Justin Lowe makes. Most obviously, it is irrepressibly theatrical, possessed of the big-budget, multimedia stagecraft that sensible critics have devoted careers to opposing. It is also overwrought, all consuming, and occasionally oppressive. Lowe has previously worked with collaborators to transform several venues — Deitch Projects, a warehouse in Miami, and Ballroom Marfa — into rooms resembling drug dens, blown-out methamphetamine labs, and abandoned retail stores. Now the Wadsworth Atheneum has commissioned him to reimagine a gallery space as part of its renowned "Matrix" program, which for the past 35 years has offered solo shows to young contemporary artists. Lowe has responded by tucking a fun-house installation of three rooms and one long hallway into a space just off one of the Wadsworth’s main galleries, which fittingly holds many of the museum’s choice Surrealist pieces. One moves from that elegant, staid space into Lowe’s exhibition, "Werewolf Karaoke," through a nondescript white door.

Inside, Lowe has carefully re-created the bathroom of the infamous Manhattan music venue CBGB, which closed in 2006, its Bowery home taken over by a John Varvatos store. The walls of this faux gents are covered with thick layers of spray-painted graffiti and stickers; a decrepit garbage can sits next to the door. Entering the bathroom is unsettling, the discordance deepened by the absence of the other stimuli one would expect: the intermingled smells of urine, spilled beer, and cheap cleaning supplies, the noise from a band. Even more bizarrely, Lowe has hung Jackson Pollocks "Number 8," 1952 (part of the Wadsworth’s collection), on one wall, where it almost blends into the tangled scrawls.

On each side of the reconstructed CBGB lavatory, Lowe has created psychedelic video rooms. The one to the left has been transformed into a 1970s-style space whose two windows, overlooking Hartford’s corporate downtown, are tinted a bright purple and a toxic green. Shape-distorting mirrors hang on the walls, and the floor is paved with cheap paperbacks, set on their spines so that their pages’ outer edges — colored blue, red, yellow, and mauve — face upward. "Feel free to take your shoes off," a guard suggests. Standing on all that pulp fiction feels pretty nice and is not a bad vantage from which to watch a whimsical video by Lowe composed of footage from the 1971 cult classic Werewolves on Wheels that loops on a television set.

The decor in the other video room is considerably sparser. Its walls are black, and scenes from two more cult classics — Barbet Schroeders druggy 1969 "More" and George Greenoughs 1973 surfer film "Crystal Voyager" — play over each other. Shots of the sky, abstract forms, and a couple embracing on a deserted beach are all made ominous by the rich, drone-based sound track, by New York’s Psychic Ills, that blasts from speakers. The room’s one nod to comfort is four modestly stuffed cushions adorned with images of scantily clad ladies, making for a rather exciting reclining experience.

It is here that the lonely, fascinating heart of Lowe’s work emerges from what first appears to be obsessively crafted gimmickry. The spaces he creates in "Werewolf Karaoke" are filled with traces of other people: graffiti on the bathroom’s walls, the splatters of Pollock’s paint, the accumulated dirt on the pages of Lowe’s book-floor, and the taste of an eccentric, exacting interior decorator. But they are devoid of actual people, representing places that exist only in a collective cultural unconscious: CBGB is gone; Pollock is too. One day in the future, when memories of the 20th century have subsided, one can imagine people mistaking the two for contemporaries — Pollock and punk, two inventive, expressive products of a New York that vanished long ago.

Addressing the gentrification of New York neighborhoods that the contemporary-art world has abetted over the past half century, sculptor Robert Morris argued in 2000 that SoHo and Chelsea have been turned into "culture ghettos a step above the theme park," adding that "today there is no margin in big-city life." Lowe creates a smart, loving, and bittersweet tribute to that lost margin: an invitation to spend some time inside that cultural space and, one hopes, recover it.

"Justin Lowe" originally appeared in the October 2010 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2010 Table of Contents.