LAURIE NYE

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— I grew up on rivers and lived next to a big one, the Mississippi. Rivers are one of the only places where I feel free and yet grounded other than my studio and I need to retreat to them each summer.

My family spent weekends on the TN River on a houseboat named after me, “The Laurie Ann”. It was aqua-colored like my birthstone, aquamarine (I’m standing on it in the first photo). Growing up on the water, my dad instilled in me a deep sense of conservation and reverence for nature. He taught me to fish when I was 7 first by allowing me to fish crappie (a type of sunfish) off the docks (second photo). Casting off was the next right of passage and I tangled many a line on stumps before it felt natural.

We continued spending time together on boats, as I became an adult, more preferably in the Ozarks on the White River. The bottom photo was taken at our favorite unloading spot at The White. The river is stocked with brown and rainbow trout and they must be of a certain size or you throw them back. It’s misty like that every morning until around noon, when it burns off and the fish bite less frequently. I scattered some of my fathers ashes there, two summers ago, to send some part of him back into the energetic continuum of the river. That place is like part of my connective tissue now.

The short video was filmed in Arkansas on The Little Red River last year. Clear and quiet, slow and beautiful, cold as hell.

A few quotes on rivers:

“Rivers have what man most respects and longs for in his own life and thought- a capacity for renewal and replenishment, continual energy, creativity, cleansing.” – John Kauffmann, author

“In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy.” – John Sawhill


Laurie Nye was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1972 and lives in Los Angeles. She earned a BFA from the Memphis College of Art in 1995 and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2002. Nye’s solo show’s include VENUSIAN WEATHER, The Pit, Los Angeles, CA (2018), her work has also been featured in one and two-person exhibitions such as ANDROMEDA, Five Car Garage, Los Angeles, CA (2015) and THE CRYSTAL EATERS, Statler & Waldorf Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2013). Her work has been included in thematic exhibitions including Moving, Still, Monya Rowe Gallery, St Augustine, FL (2017); Filtergeist, Open House, Brooklyn, NY (2017); Flying Man Revolved, Dread Lounge, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Super Bloom, PostLA, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Forest at The Edge of Time, The Pit, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Figure it Out, The Dot Project, London, (2016); and The White Album, Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014). Nye is a member of the all-female collectives Witch and Chameleon and The Binder of Women. Her recent curatorial project The Airtight Garage was presented at Big Pictures, Los Angeles, CA.

laurienye.com