Lynn Aldrich

Lynn Aldrich, Breaker, steel, wood, fiberglass, garden hoses, 36" x 32" x 50", 1999. Collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Lynn Aldrich (born 1944) is an American sculptor whose art draws from both high and low cultural influences and materials. Reviews have characterized her work variously as "slyly Minimalist meditations" on color, light and space and whimsical "Home Depot Pop" Leah Ollman and Claudine Ise of the Los Angeles Times term Aldrich's art, respectively, a "consumerist spin on the assemblage tradition" and a "witty brand of kitchen-sink Conceptualism"

Aldrich has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Hammer Museum and Santa Monica Museum of Art. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2014 and her work belongs to the public art collections of LACMA, MOCA and the Portland Art Museum, among others.

Early life and career Aldrich was born in Bryan, Texas into a military family that moved throughout the United States. Her father was a veterinary pathologist at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and National Zoo (Washington, DC) and science was an influence on her early interests and subsequent art practice. She initially studied biology at Stetson University, working as a virology lab assistant at Smith, Kline & French Laboratories (Philadelphia) during college summers. She appeared in group shows at MOCA, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, San Francisco Art Institute, P.P.O.W. (New York), and Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. In her later career, Carl Berg Gallery, Ben Maltz Gallery, Edward Cella Art+Architecture and DENK Gallery in Los Angeles and Jenkins Johnson Gallery (New York) have held solo exhibitions of Aldrich's work.

Lynn Aldrich, Installation view from "Uncommon Objects" exhibition, Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design, 2013. Pictured: Subdivision, 1990 (foreground, Collection MOCA Los Angeles); Worm Hole, 2003 (background, Collection of Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Winter Park, Florida); Shelf Life, 1992 (left wall); and Constellation, 2005/2013 (right wall).

Work and reception Aldrich incorporates a wide range of reference points in her work: the excess and spectacle of consumer culture and life in Los Angeles, art and literary influences, natural and celestial phenomena, and the Christian longing for revelation and transcendence. Critics often note resulting dualities in her work of banality and profundity, humorous spectacle and near-apocalyptic concern, scientific empiricism and faith. She creates through processes of accumulation, repetition and placement that preserve the fundamental, recognizable nature of her source materials. The resulting works (and their punning titles) fuse, deconstruct or short-circuit form, function and meaning, "stunningly formalist arrangements" Meshing high-cultural minimalist form with the symbolism of mass-produced objects, works such as Subdivision (1990) or Shelf Life (1992) offered open-ended commentary on suburban domesticity, bourgeois humanism, and Modernist artistic practice. Subdivision featured sections of white picket fence arranged in a tight square formation that reviewers wrote signified both idealized suburban life and the claustrophobia or menace of pristine but squeezed living; David Pagel described Waxing and Waning (1990)—two dozen strips of wax paper hanging between plastic dispensers on adjoining walls—as a graceful, "ghostly send-up of Robert Morris’s seminal felt pieces" alluding to the invisibility and power of domestic labor. The nested, resin-starched t-shirts of Shell Collection (1993–4) referenced the life cycle and natural forms such as tree rings, organic sheddings, or chrysalises; ARTnews 's Suzanne Muchnic described such works as "unusual think pieces" whose light touch, wry humor, and ephemerality made their "ideas all the more memorable because they seem weightless." More whimsical, busier in its color, spatial and textural range, this work pushed further against minimalist restrictions concerning narrative and referential content, connecting to bodily and connotative associations

In Designer's Choice (Genesis) (1997; a floor grid of 125 faux-fur upholstery fabric swatches) and Worm Hole (2003; a tunnel of concrete casting tubes lined with a spectrum of faux-fur), Aldrich mixed low-end, near-garish consumer products, minimalist form and spiritual, scientific and metaphysical allusions. For Breaker (1999), Serpentarium (2002) and Drench (2008), she re-contextualized common garden hoses, using their aqua-to-green hues like pigments and conjuring allusions to water, poised snakes in paradise, suburban backyards, and abstract stripe paintings, among others; Sea Change (2003) is a Day-Glo diorama of undersea life constructed out of kitchen sponges and scrub pads; Starting Over: Neo-Atlantis uses cleaning products and toilet plungers to create a hyperbolic, synthetic undersea world whose riot of color rivals nature's chromatic range. Leah Ollman described such work as packing "a cartoon-like pow [that] resonate powerfully—and whimsically—with both natural and unnatural worlds, the domestic sphere and global trauma."

Public recognition Aldrich has been awarded fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation (2014), J. Paul Getty Trust (2000), and City of Los Angeles (COLA, 1999). and the Armory Center for the Arts (for the temporary public installation, Three Founts, 2010).