Lorenzo Bueno, Zora Moniz, Liz Magic Laser, Marie Lorenz, Clémence de La Tour du Pin, Lyric Shen, Sofia Sinibaldi, & Jeff Williams
Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to present Contemporary Fossil Record, a group exhibition of eight New York-based artists.
The exhibition showcases works that, like fossils, record human existence through a fragmented collection of impressions, molds, and traces of activity. The artists use the textural landscape of their surroundings to delve into the evolving significance and decay of objects, spaces, and memories.
Marie Lorenz creates metronomes from cast detritus found in the tidal New York City waterways. Viewers are able to set the metronome into motion, mirroring the rhythm of the water from which the original objects came. Jeff Williams is interested in the materiality of architectural surfaces and crafts clothing from rubber molds of weathered exteriors of rice silos.
Liz Magic Laser's Distressed doesn't utilize a static impression, rather, it records the choreographed gestures of dancers as they rub their new jeans on the city's rough sidewalks, resulting in a reflection of a particular style of our time. Opposite this piece, Lorenzo Bueno, whose practice often responds to the architecture of the city, sculpted a miniature of Judson Memorial. His rendition of the space dedicated to the experimentation of bodily movement and dance, includes layered paint and photographs strung in its interiors.
Zora Moniz's collaged wall works use frottage, nails, and carved tin cans to map out the area where she frequently walks. Walking through the city also inspires Clémence de La Tour du Pin's practice, who uses concrete-looking material to encapsulate assemblages of found images and detritus.
Sofia Sinibaldi documents the city using a portable scanner and a camera. She prints the images on translucent tissue paper and layers them into collages, which adds delicate texture to the compositions. Lastly, Lyric Shen's images are water transferred onto irregular hand-made clay slabs, a technique that purposefully alters the photograph, thus grappling with the passage of time and our attempts at preserving it.
The exhibition poses the question: who are we but that which we leave behind?