Visual Poetry - Lori Reed & Rae Standard

Exhibition Statement:

Poetry evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience or a specific emotional response through language chosen and arranged for its meaning, sound and rhythm. This Visual Poetry show attempts to increase your awareness and evoke memory, meaning and a sense of place.

Lori Reed’s work has evolved over the last two decades from traditional collage to a style that is uniquely her own. She begins with a photo of a landscape or composite of wildlife with an unusual background, and then she runs filters on the photo to make variations that are more abstracted and painterly. Choosing three to four versions, she makes laser prints, cuts those into strips and builds the artwork on a wood panel using the strips of paper. In the final layer, she embeds little treasures to find—vintage postage stamps, shredded currency, book text, or map fragments. The result is a piece that has depth and movement and mystery.

Rae Standard has created art since she was a child, but one of her careers was a hair stylist. She’s taken that skill of studying faces and applied it to sculpting clay into beautiful busts of women with exotic hair or hats. The women all have a bit of mystery about them with their glazes subservient to their forms. Where are they going, who are they awaiting, what poems are they writing?