Jean Lowe’s new exhibition The Loneliness Clinic explores the intersection of psychiatry and mid-century modernist design. The installation includes all the furnishings and trappings that one might encounter in a psychiatrist’s office, beginning with the waiting room, with its magazine and pamphlet racks, Breuer chairs, and rubber plant. Upon close inspection, the viewer realizes that all the apparently weighty objects are handmade, enamel-painted papier-mâché replicas. In a similar moment of realization, the solid authority of the therapist’s office dissolves into a web of humorous references including sham diplomas and credentials, bound volumes cataloging absurd disorders, and mega-store prescription drug bottles. Knick-knacks such as Greek vases and classical statuettes, usually meant to demonstrate good taste and worldliness, seem to poke fun at the supposed triumph of Western rationality and the authority of the classical education.