Lorin Labardee

In 1980, Lorin Labardee answered an artist call at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. His entry was a humorous take on cedar wood tourist tchotchkes. It was his first group exhibition. During a furniture seminar at the Rhode Island School of Design under Tage Frid, Mr. Labardee realized he much preferred drawing to woodworking and switched to two dimensional media. 

In 1982 Mr. Labardee enrolled in a series of photography classes under Harold Jones at the University of Arizona. His How To Make a Sandwich project was selected for the UA Fine Arts Department collection. Mr. Labardee's first solo show, The White Dove-Color and Wonder documented the historic Mission San Xavier del Bac in Tucson, Arizona.

After studying with Craig Cully, a fine arts associate professor at NMSU, Mr. Labardee switched to painting. Mr. Labardee’s one-person show at the Joel Valdez Main Library, Encyclopedia of Hats featured over 30 highly realistic portraits on scavenged book covers.

Mr. Labardee has exhibited throughout the United States. He has received financial support from the Arts Foundation for Tucson, the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Penland School of Crafts. He has worked as an arts educator for the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona and Casa de los Ninos.  

Labardee's recent work borrows techniques from Gerhardt Richter and Agnes Martin – grids of layered paint that spotlight vintage mid-century modern iconography – imagery suffuse with the unbridled hubris of rampant consumerism and greed still dominant today. 

Artist Statement

Lorin Labardee’s work is impious, irreverent, dark and delicious. “It’s grim out there; I make fun,”

In his collages and acrylic paintings, Lorin Labardee stitches grids and patterns with heavy doses of dark humor and irony that beckon the viewer to look closer and then wrap themselves in the comfort of confrontation whenever the current climate pulls one toward ennui and melancholy. 

Labardee was born in 1951 and has first hand knowledge of the postwar era. It serves as the foundation for this work.  He adores the symbolism and energy of the 1950s and early 60s. He borrows and steals that iconography to great effect. In both collage and acrylic paint he weaves warm blankets viewers use to cloak themselves against the ill winds that blow in today's political climate. 

Labardee’s representations from the fifties and sixties feel fresh and ingenuous, displaying little of the polish and artifice endemic in today’s media universe; ideal and ripe for adaptation to his larger purpose.

The endless winter that blankets our cultural landscape cares little for innocence while elevating opportunism and exploitation to new levels of normalcy. Labardee’s work challenges these false mythologies of American cultural life including: the consumerist messaging of postwar American advertising, jingoist news media coverage and simplistic.