My early graduate work at California Institute of the Arts which included a yearlong study at New Yorks Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studio Program centered on the nuclear weapons industry top nuclear weapons contractors and the consumer products they manufacture. In 1988 I received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in a group exhibition, Tableaux/Vivante Morte at San Diego Installation Gallery for my installation: The Man Behind The Man Behind The Gun: A San Diego Nuclear Weapons Data Base Project.

In the early 90s I began creating a body of work entitled PACIFIC SERIES: Environmental Assemblages constructed of marine salvage and other found objects culled from coastline beaches, appropriating images found and digitally manipulated merging painting, collage, assemblage and 3D sculptural works while addressing issues of environmental concern from nuclear waste and nuclear weapons production to toxic spills and the threat to the worlds oceans and marine habitat.

PACIFIC SERIES assemblage Pacific Oil #2 was selected for an international three-year traveling exhibition, Toxic Landscapes: U.S. Artists Examine the Environment, which opened at Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham College Gallery in Pittsburgh PA, in October 2001, as part of the United Nations Womens Environment & Development Organization planning conference: Women Assess the State of the Environment (WASTE), designing an agenda of womens environmental issues and concerns for the international UN Earth Summit 2002, in Johannesburg, South Africa. Toxic Landscapes was also featured at Bibliotca Nacional José Martí, Main Gallery, Havana, Cuba, in collaboration with Cuban artists during June and July of 2002. Toxic Landscapes closed with an exhibition in the U.S. on the east coast in July of 2004 at Long Beach Island Foundation for Arts and Sciences with a special focus on their coastal wetlands project.

In June 2005, as part of the United Nations designation of San Francisco as the world site for World Environment Day, two of my PACIFIC SERIES assemblages, Red Skerrie Saver #2 and STOP! were selected for a northern California group exhibition, California Current: State of the Ocean, a confluence of art and the ocean from British Columbia to Baja in an effort to stimulate awareness of the fragile California coastline. In 2006, I created a site-specific installation in the lobby of the Ventura County Museum of History and Art, ”PARROT FISH: Species Adaptation Channel Islands Habitat,” found objects gathered over a year of sponsored boat trips to the Channel Islands by the Ventura Museum of History & Art and the National Park Service for “Island Passages: Artists Celebrate The Channel Islands,” a group exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Channel Islands marine sanctuary. In 2006, PACIFIC SERIES was exhibited in two one-person shows, ”Rising Tides & Warning Signs,” traveling to the northern California coast of Point Reyes at Gallery Route One in their Environmental Project Space: With the Earth, March 31 thru May 7, 2006, and to the Monterey coast, October 1- November 3, 2006, at Monterey Peninsula College Art Gallery.

The past few years I have created assemblages using reclaimed materials from the California fires working with Art from the Ashes (www.artfromtheashes.org)  a Los Angeles non-profit organization assembled to create artwork to benefit communities, individuals and businesses that have been devastated by natural disaster through the creation of art.

In 2008/09, I published PACIFIC SERIES: Environmental Assemblages, bringing together for the first time 70 full-color images in a large format hardbound book illustrating my mixed-media assemblages and installations providing a historical overview of my work from the early 80s at California Institute of the Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Studio Program, to my current work in Santa Barbara, California. Keeping with an eco-friendly theme, the print-on-demand book, PACIFIC SERIES can be previewed online in its entirety and ordered for print at http://www.blurb.com/books/439458

Recent reviews of my work:

http://www.independent.com/news/2010/mar/03/lost-found-assembled/
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-outthere6-2009oct06,0,3867804.story
http://www.independent.com/news/2009/feb/19/laura-lynch-releases-art-book/