ARCHIPELAGO

“He looked up from the map and stared out the window. And I stared out the window, too. The glass in our windows is thick and leaded. And beyond the windows – the Zone. There it is, just reach out and you can touch it. From the thirteenth floor it looks like it could fit in the palm of your hand.”

 From “Roadside Picnic” by Arkady and Boris Stragatsky

The Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present its second solo exhibition by Marie Lorenz. Traveling New York City’s waterways by tidal current in a boat that she designed and built, Lorenz accesses an unusual perspective of a familiar locale. Viewed from the waterline, the buoyant, estranged metropolis interrupts our collective and habitual experience of it, reminding us that we can ‘un-know’ a place by continuing to explore it.

The exhibition is made up of three videos projected together with objects found along the harbors. “The tide acts like a giant centrifuge,” writes the artist, “reorganizing things according to their shape and density”. In “collaboration” with the tide, Lorenz makes a record of these objects by printing, casting, or videotaping them. Each video was shot from an apparatus connected to the body of the artist and to the boat while en route from Barren Island to her home in Bushwick. This same geographical path is shown three different ways: from a birds-eye view of the artist, at the horizon line and along the shifting contour of the land.

Marie Lorenz received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1995 and an MFA from Yale University in 2002. Lorenz has shown nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, Artpace in Texas, Locust Projects in Miami, Ikon Gallery in England, and at the Kunstlerhaus in Bremen, Germany. Lorenz was a recipient of the 2008 Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize for a residency at the American Academy in Rome. In 2009, she was appointed Assistant Professor at the Yale School of Art. The exhibition is part of her ongoing performance, The Tide and Current Taxi.