Website: https://mcac.wildapricot.org/event-3244691
Location: McLean County Arts Center, Sales Gallery
Date: April 12 – May 24, 2019
Reception: Friday, April 26, 5-7 PM

Lori Reed was born on a farm outside of Galesburg, Illinois and spent most of her adult life as a Galesburg resident where she ran a graphic design business. She received her BFA from the University of Illinois. She’s been making mixed media collages for the past 14 years and has used photos as the basis of her work since 2009. Nature inspires Lori in her work and her daily life.

Lori has been exhibiting her artwork since 2006 in group or two-person shows. She’s had her work accepted into national juried shows in Illinois, Iowa, New York and Colorado. She was awarded the Purchase Prize in GALEX 44 in 2010, so her piece “More Than Merely Ourselves” is in the permanent collection of the Galesburg Civic Art Center. In 2011, Lori received an Honorable Mention prize in the Open Small Works show of the National Association of Women Artists Gallery in New York, New York for her artwork “Impressions”. Over the past 10 years, she’s sold her work in galleries located in Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, Montana and Arizona.

The artwork Lori makes has her photography as its base. Using Adobe Photoshop or Prisma, she makes three to four variations of the photo (giving the image a painterly, sketchy or scratched look) and cuts the prints into strips or irregular shapes. She builds the scene on cradled panels with sections from each of the altered photos. Sometimes she adds in pieces of handmade papers, topographical maps, text, or fragments from old ledger books to further abstract the scene. She’s moving from a photographic documentation of a place at a particular time to an impression of a place that is timeless…more of a memory or a feeling of the space.