Lynn Schuette

During the first year of the pandemic, the surprise and uncertainty of our medical crisis along with a volatile political situation created a perfect storm of anxiety for me. My mind and body simply could not do get through my personal process of making art which takes clarity and composure - the distillation of the personal, social, cultural, and spiritual. To purge and clear my head I began throwing away some old paintings. When I started to rip and cut them, I felt like I was tearing off my own skin. I realized that I could not and should not destroy the work but use it for a new purpose. I like to call it redeployed not destroyed. The works in this series use parts of 12 large paintings from five different series from 1995 to 2005. I used fragments of the old canvases, layering imagery from different times, sometimes using new painted passages, to pull them together to speak to the present. The 20 new works range from the large panels shown here to grids composed of numerous small paintings.