La Journée des Lemmings (Lemming’s Day)
June Wayne
96 x 132 in. (243,8 x 335,3 cm)
Tapestry, two examples woven by Pierre Daquin, Atelier de Saint Cyr.
1971
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
MB Abram Galleries, 2018; Pasadena Museum of Art, 2014; Art Institute of Chicago, 2010; Mason Gross School of the Arts Gallery, 2005; Neuberger Museum of Art, 1997; National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1994; Fresno Art Museum, 1988; Macalaster College, 1986; Pomona College, 1978; Franco-American Institute, 1978; Van Doren Gallery, 1976; Galerie La Demeure, 1974; Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, 1973.
COMMENTS
June Wayne was fascinated by the capabilities of science to advance or subvert the interests of the planet and its inhabitants.
In 1962 scientist Rachel Carson had sounded the alarm in “Silent Spring” as to the dangers of the use of DDT to the environment. Such concerns crystalized in Earth Day in 1970. Wayne had similarly been intuiting ecological and global changes for many years. In 1968 she created the lithograph “Lemming’s Day”, a work of ominous foreboding. She revisited this image in the monumental and complex tapestry woven in France under her direction “La Journée Des Lemmings”, 1971.
Curator Bernard Kester described the work: “In ‘Lemming’s Day’ Wayne manipulates black with white almost equally to evoke the threatening flood-drenched, windswept primordial terrain that reaches beyond the tapestry borders. Within the catastrophic movement emphatically expressed, numbers of generalized figure forms are compelled to tumble headlong across a harsh and mottled plane toward the abyss, providing a stark narrative component that is told with accelerating speed.” (from “June Wayne—The Art of Everything” by Robert P. Conway)
