Jungle Road
May 3 – June 3, 2018
My book “Jungle Road” is a response to the naturalized habitat at the Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida. I photographed there intermittingly over a period of 2 years. Using my eyes couldn’t satisfy my curiosity. The surfaces of the plants and the environs invited contact that I found tempting to touch with my hands. The life occurrences in this tropical place are in constant flow, recycling and varying with seemingly faster flux than I have observed before. The swift changes and immediacy of each interaction set me in search of a more tactile, everyday material to present my images. I settled on using newsprint for its rough texture as well as it being a recycled material. After years of working with digital technology and the computer screen I felt very separated from the actions of making things with my hands. Being in this richly fibrous and multi-surfaced habitat lead me to crave working with my hands in a direct manner. Influenced by my former career designing hand knit sweaters this place drove me back to working with fibers and textiles.
The textured feel and soft appearance of newsprint lead to printing on linen and the series “Bark Cloth”. Holding the pliable material in my hands and drawing with embroidery threads furthered my meditative experience and connection with trees.
The time spent making stitches allowed me to re-look and actively reconsider my perceptions. I am fascinated how the change of scale and separation from the context of origin causes our imagination to search for meaning. 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.
