Marie Lorenz’s exhibition Archipelago at Jack Hanley Gallery is comprised of three videos projected alongside objects she found along the New York City’s harbors. “The tide acts like a giant centrifuge,” writes the artist in her press release, “reorganizing things according to their shape and density”. A frequent navigator of the harbors in her ongoing project The Tide and Current Taxi, Lorenz has operated a rowboat water taxi since 2005 documenting each trip through pictures and stories. (I was lucky enough to have been granted passage on the rowboat taxi in 2010 through the oil spills of the Gowanus Canal.)
For Archipelago, she operated a camera hanging like a boom from an apparatus strapped to her body. The largest projected video is a series of dizzying camera maneuvers through the harbor as well as Lorenz’s preparatory run to the supply store. The large scale sculptures evoke the cast off detritus found along the shores – a tree-like totem adorned with objects, a bleacher construction built from gorgeous bleached driftwood and the decaying hull of a boat. New York Times critic Roberta Smith describes a Lorenz sculpture seen at the Independent this weekend as suggesting “an improvised shelter and also a monument (maybe to Bruce Nauman).” A sculptor and printmaker by training, Lorenz is an adventurer in spirit, pushing herself to the point of shipwreck and not only surviving but creating art from it.
Archipelago is on view at Jack Hanley Gallery from March 7 – 31, 2012.
Visit Jack Hanley’s page on Paddle8 to view work by Marie Lorenz and other artist.