Laura Lynch Releases Art Book

Artist Laura Lynch begins her new coffee table art book, Pacific Series: Environmental Assemblages, with an unabashed political statement, explaining that the pretty red lifesavers that appear in several of her nautically appealing pieces became for her “a reminder of how the entire human species might very well need to be saved one day from drowning in a sea of ignorance and greed.”

One would expect no less from Lynch. After all, this is an artist who presented the names of nuclear weapons contractors-on pink rose petal wallpaper-and identified the consumer products they manufactured in her 1984 New Jersey storefront-window installation Consumer Connection: A Healthy Diet of the Status Quo.

Her Pacific Series is not so in-your-face. Begun when she was living near Miramar Beach in 1996, they have a keen smell of salt air and are infused with the simple joy of beachcombing, if your idea of beachcombing is to drag select 90-pound slabs of boat siding back to your studio like a terrier with a whale bone. Most of the materials she uses in these assemblages are beach salvage, except for the oil paintings and photographs she also sometimes includes.