“Lynn Aldrich is able to firmly lodge a conceptual wrench into the mechanism of meaning, somewhere between the signified and the signifier…” -Christina Valentine

Romance and Reality Will Kiss One Another presents sites of contemplation, where the pastoral beauty of nature is inseparable from the ledge upon which it may meet its end. We walk with the artist along a conceptual tightrope where observation meets the unknowable. In an unusual pairing of new works with older, less-seen pieces borrowed from private collections, Lynn Aldrich continues to explore the relationship between empirical knowledge as acquired by science and an interior longing for insight and meaning in contemporary life.

With fascination and reverence for the idyllic imagery of water, light, stars and planets, flora and fauna, Aldrich fosters a practical desire for environmental preservation while pointing to our excess and artificiality. Known for using readily available consumer products such as garden hoses, rain downspouts, and cleaning supplies, she opens up her material search to a broader, textural world, including velvet and sewing threads, tar and sandpaper, bird swings and fence pickets. Her sculpture and wall constructions examine the tension between nature and culture as we watch one collapse into the other.

While pursuing an MFA at ArtCenter, Pasadena, she was introduced to the writings of Paul Virilio and Simone Weil, revealing to the artist a slower, more attentive way of thinking and making. Aldrich is known to frequent home and garden stores looking for specimens to collect and examine in the studio, not unlike a scientist looking for ancient fossils or undiscovered insects to study in the lab. Unexpected beauty and metaphor emerge as her artworks are constructed.

In Romance and Reality Will Kiss One Another, Two sculptures from FLORA, a 1989 gallery exhibition referencing forests and trees, are reinstalled with fresh plant cuttings. Also from that year, a room-sized installation of plaid carpet, Grid Buster, is presented with its original soundtrack of Gregorian Chant and vacuum cleaner interruptions. Several framed collage studies use fragments of consumer materials along with commercial photography, ads, and text. These, along with other works, draw a through-line where Aldrich develops a visual language all her own, with a practice rooted in a sustained inquiry into the relationship between science and spirituality, humanity and nature, and the dance between these realms.

Aldrich says, "I make art not about identity, but about what it means to be human with an outward gaze on the world. A most bizarre, extravagant cosmos is being revealed in my lifetime. I appreciate the feminism that makes it possible for a woman to think as the complex person she is and be free to make objects that address what she finds most compelling for her time on the planet.”