This content was published: November 4, 2022. Phone numbers, email addresses, and other information may have changed.
Niraja Lorenz
Rock Creek Helzer Gallery
Niraja Lorenz – Strange Attractors
Strange Attractor #13 – Skyview, Fiber, 2015, 73″ x 76″
- Exhibition dates: November 7, 2022 – January 28, 2023
- Artist talk: Tuesday, November 29, 2022
Strange Attractors is an exhibition of abstract quilts by Eugene based artist Niraja Lorenz. Shapes, patterns, and colors collide in these works which explore chaos in all its forms. Chaos theory and the Butterfly Effect – the idea that a small change in initial conditions can affect a large change over time – play a central role in how the artist conceives of her work and the world she inhabits. These works explore the notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, that while the world is unpredictable and changing, it is not random.
The kaleidoscopic patterns in the quilts are pieced together from tiny solid-colored pieces of commercial and hand-dyed cotton fabric. Without a predetermined plan, these small, stitched beginnings serve as the initial conditions that influence the development of the whole. The scale relationships of the various forms, as well as the color relationships create undulating illusionistic spaces which evoke aerial views, microscopic and macroscopic imagery, cross sections, and often all of these at once. Like kaleidoscopes, these works read as systems in the process of change and invite us to explore our own relationships to different systems, be it political, environmental, or relational.
Niraja Lorenz is a 2019 recipient of the Hallie Ford Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the Ford Family Foundation in Roseburg, OR, and a 2021 recipient of a Career Opportunity Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission and the Ford Family Foundation.
She has a firmly established reputation in the world of fine art quilting and has received awards in Form not Function: Quilt Art at the Carnegie at the Carnegie Center for Art and Art History in New Albany, IN. She also has awards from Quilts = Art = Quilts at the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn, NY, Art Quilt Elements at Wayne Art Center in Wayne, PA, and New Legacies at the Lincoln Center in Fort Collins, CO. Lorenz has exhibited her work throughout the United States and at the Tuch und Technik Textilmuseum in Neumunster Germany.