NEW WORK: Wendy Lemen Bredehoft and Susan Moldenhauer, SΘK Gallery

In their first two-person exhibition since Touchstone Laramie 2004, artist Wendy Lemen Bredehoft and photographer Susan Moldenhauer presented their most recent work in a new gallery space in Laramie, WY called SΘK (soak). The two-day pop-up style exhibition, NEW WORK: Wendy Lemen Bredehoft and Susan Moldenhauer, followed the tradition of the biennial Touchstone Laramie presented by the Laramie Artist Project with an invitation-only opening and two days of public viewing.

Wendy Lemen Bredehoft, Touchstone Laramie 2004, Wyoming Territorial Park

Susan Moldenhauer, Touchstone Laramie 2004, Wyoming Territorial Park

The artists’ 2004 exhibition was presented in the Horse Barn of the Wyoming Territorial Park, the site of the historic Wyoming Territorial Prison. The impulse for Bredehoft and Moldenhauer to present their work in an alternative gallery space was that both were arts administrators; Bredehoft was the Director of Wyoming State Parks & Cultural Resources and Moldenhauer was the Director of the University of Wyoming Art Museum. As such neither were able to present their work in the organizations they ran. But both were practicing artists and it became important to become known in that way also.

The exhibition garnered a great deal of attention which led Bredehoft and Moldenhauer to explore ways that might create new opportunities for other practicing artists in the Laramie / Albany County area. In 2006 the first Touchstone Laramie was presented at the then Ramada Inn motel, where 20+ artists transformed as many hotel rooms into individual gallery spaces. The Laramie Artist Project, an all-artist all-volunteer collaborative, was formed.

The Laramie Artist Project has continued to present Touchstone Laramie as a biennial exhibition ever since and until COVID-19 arrived. The 2020 version of the exhibition became an online-only adventure as the artists tried to learn and adapt to a virtual exhibition format. With the lingering pandemic,  the artists decided not to present an in-person event in 2022 and will be convening in the weeks ahead to explore the future of Touchstone Laramie.

It is noteworthy that the Laramie community truly embraced the Laramie Artist Project with their financial support which made it all possible. The Wyoming Arts Council and Wyoming Cultural Trust Fund have also been continual funders.

SΘK Gallery, ready for opening night, with Right Angle Rehab table

For Bredehoft and Moldenhauer, 2022 seemed like an important time to find a new space and a new way to present their current work. And how fortunate that Bob Moore of Right Angle Rehab has been working on a line of contemporary tables made by reimagining old doors for new purposes and has been transforming his storefront on S 2nd St into a showroom called SΘK Gallery. What an honor for NEW WORK to be its inaugural exhibition.

2023 Wyoming Arts Council Fellowship Award recipients

The Wyoming Arts Council has announced its 2023 Fellowship Award recipients. I am very honored to join Wyoming’s remarkable artists in the visual, creative writing, performing and Native American arts who are recieving awards this year.

Fellowship awards are merit-based and selected from submitted portfolios of work that reflect serious and exceptional artistic investigation. Visual arts recipients will be part of a biennial Fellowship Exhibition organized by the Wyoming Arts Council in the future.

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.

She needs a round, and not like she used to serve (July 21, 2019)

I am very excited to announce an exhibition of my work, Every thing is not all right, at the O’Sullivan Art Gallery at Regis University in Denver, CO. The exhibition opens on March 7, 2022, and continues through April 7, 2022.

Every thing is not all right is a selection of 38 works from the first four years of the View from Home series. Inspired by the 2016 election, the series began on the night before the inauguration and is a response to shared and personal events since then. It began and continues as an exploration of juxtaposing images and found text. My interest is one of empowering the print with an emotional equivalence to the text as a way of acknowledging and reconciling the present time and history.

Every thing is not all right presents a time when fast-paced, immediate, and reactive hyper-social media escalated dramatically. Truth and lies. Discord and division. Pandemic. Climate. Democracy. All challenged.

Exhibition announcement

This exhibition was funded in part by a grant from the Wyoming Arts Council.

I am pleased to announce that I have works in two juried exhibitions in February and March.

Illuminance X

Size Matters (February 11 – March 11, 2022) is on view at Sparks Gallery in San Diego, CA. Juried by Bayley Mizelle, Director of the Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles (PAC LA), the exhibition celebrates artwork smaller than 10 inches in scale by 40 artists from North America and Europe. Size Matters is the premier photography exhibition by Medium Photo that recognizes photographic directions in small-scaled works.

Illuminance X (2018, 7 x 7 inches) is from my collaborative work with Sequencing Through Time and Place at the Carissa Gold Mine, South Pass City, WY. It is part of a small series of images that explore the focused illuminations of light that move through the main building of the mine as the sun passes with the day.

Reaching the zenith of darkness (December 21, 2019)

All About the Light (February 4 – March 26, 2022) was juried by Susan Burnstine, award-winning fine art and commercial photographer, for the Southeast Center for Photography in Greenville, SC. The exhibition explores the use of light, illumination, and darkness in contemporary images by 40 photographers. An online exhibition and catalog are available.

Reaching the zenith of darkness (December 21, 2019; 16 x 20 inches) is from my current View from Home series which began 5 years ago when I began intuitively juxtaposing images and found text, not only as a reflection on what the text refers to but what might be implied within the visceral experience of the photographic print. The series was inspired by the 2017 inauguration and my approaching career shift to my studio practice 10 months later, both acutely focused my attention on time and place — my time in my life, my geographic place, and my view from this place in the context of national and world events. The View from Home series continues as an exploration in empowering the print with an emotional or poetic equivalence to the text as a way of reconciling this moment in time and history.