In the Loop
Alumni News : Feb 9, 2015

Art alumnus currently exhibiting 2D and 3D work in Connecticut

By Jessie Ward

Sculptor and painter Loren Myhre (BFA Art ’01) will be exhibiting works in the show Rockless Volume at the Fred Giampietro Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut, Jan. 10-Feb. 21, 2015. The works in this exhibition are small steel sculptures and a series of collages executed on pages of newspapers.

Myhre creates his sculptures and collages with a variety of elements. “Materially, I gravitate toward using steel as a main element in my sculptures, and collage has always been present in both my 2D and 3D endeavors,” Myhre says. “Both disciplines challenge me greatly.

On the one hand, you can be engaged in a slow extension of time building an object to occupy space, and on the other spectrum, constructing a flat image that simulates space and can often be more of an immediate process.”

Myhre came to know the Fred Giampietro Gallery through a video blog that one of the other artists in Rockless Volume, Zachary Keeting, helps maintain. He reached out to Giampietro more than a year ago and formed a relationship. Every month or so, he would share new developments in his work with Giampietro and they would engage in something like a mini critique over the phone.

“I think Fred has a real instinctual way for knowing how to pair particular artists whose work shares a similar dialogue or intersects in odd ways,” Myhre says of his work being shown alongside Keeting’s. “When the gallery decided to bring me on last year, I was given the spot to show alongside Zachary and Anahita Vossoughi, and I couldn’t be happier with the pairing.”

Myhre credits the teaching artists at UF for helping him prepare for his art career and relating the importance of focusing and cultivating one’s own unique vision and style.

“They stressed the value and importance of working with traditional models, of seeing combined with the traditional practices of painting, drawing and sculpture,” Myhre says. “They believed that if you were rooted firmly in these foundations, in how to use and execute materials and tools, that real substance and invention would follow.

“The techniques and words they shared have stuck with me through the years.”