Co-founders of Laramie’s biennial Touchstone Laramie are planning a two-person exhibition weekend in July in lieu of the full event that would regularly occur in fall 2022. Event planners decided to delay the larger exhibition again given the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic.
Wendy Lemen Bredehoft will present her newest embellished tapestries, Threading Through Time. The original images were made as field sketches and transformed into Strappo prints or pastels which were then converted into larger jacquard tapestries by a computerized, digital weaving mill in North Carolina. Jacquard fabric is a process in which the image and its colors are incorporated into the weaving of the fabric rather than dyed onto the fabric surface. Bredehoft hand-stitches onto the weavings, creating new textures and bringing visual emphasis to the images. As she combines traditional handcrafted techniques with contemporary weavings, new ways of thinking about the imagery inspired the next versions.
Susan Moldenhauer will present photographic images from her View from Home series and the recent exhibition, Every thing is not all right. With the 2017 inauguration, she began working with text—found words from the media and press—and images made in response to the ever-active high-plains skies of Laramie. Timestamping both maintain a conceptual connection between them. The series became an emotional response to the fast-paced, immediate, and reactive hyper-social media bombardment that was part of our collective experience during the next four years. Her tonally nuanced prints further the emotional potential of how image and text work together.
NEW WORK: Wendy Lemen Bredehoft and Susan Moldenhauer marks their first two-person endeavor since 2004 when the artists presented their work in an exhibition at the Territorial Prison. Thinking that it may benefit the artist community in Laramie to work together for a larger group event, they established the Laramie Artists Project which presented the first full-scale exhibition in 2006.
The exhibition will be the inaugural exhibit in the new SΘK (soak) Gallery at 1004 S Second St. It will be open to the public on Saturday, June 23, 10 am – 5 pm and Sunday, June 24, 12 – 5 pm.