Laurie Lambrecht
Jungle Road
May 3–June 3, 2018
Artist talk: Thursday, May 3, 5:00 PM
Intermittently over a period of two years, Laurie Lambrecht photographed the lush habitat surrounding the Robert Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, Florida. Inspired by the multi-layered and textured environment as well as the formal relationships between the plant and human life found there, she began printing her images on the soft surface of recycled newsprint to convey the irresistibly tactile nature of the place. This focus on patterns and texture, as well as a desire to work more directly with her hands, soon led to Lambrecht's Bark Cloth series, which is also included in this exhibition. Close-up photographs of trees are printed on linen and embroidered by the artist along the unique lines and patterns of the bark. Lambrecht writes, “I love that the bark of a tree can appear to be a topographical map, and how the outlines of the bark’s scales can read like rivers or mountains. I am using lines of embroidered thread as a visual guide through the bark’s imagined landscape.”
Laurie Lambrecht was born in Bridgehampton, New York and resides there today. She earned her undergraduate degree at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, and has studied in graduate programs at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York, where she also worked at the George Eastman House. Lambrecht’s projects include documenting Roy Lichtenstein’s studio in the early 1990s while she was his assistant. Inside Roy Lichtenstein’s Studio was exhibited in Houston at the Bank of America Center during the FotoFest 2010 Biennial, as well as at Blue Sky, and abroad. China 2009, a series of landscapes, taken during her first trip east, was exhibited at Rick Wester Fine Art, New York in 2012. Lambrecht participated in Centro Colombo Americano de Medellín’s 2013 Zoomlab in Colombia, working with high school and university students for two weeks. While in Colombia, she had a solo exhibition at El Museo Universidad de Antioquia. This is Lambrecht's second solo show at Blue Sky.