Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to announce Marie Lorenz's fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. DRIFT TILT will feature collage and kinetic sculpture cast from debris washed up on the city’s shore. These artworks reflect Lorenz’s ongoing exploration of New York by boat. Like objects emerging from an eroding bank, or a group of contemporary fossils, they preserve impressions of discarded objects, capturing each surface as they shift in significance.
In 2022, during her collaboration on the opera Newtown Odyssey, Lorenz began experimenting with the pendulum as a tool for generating sound. A pendulum can regulate tempo, and demonstrate the laws of motion. In practices like dowsing or divination, it is believed to reveal hidden answers or detect energy fields. Pendulum clocks also played a vital role in early navigation, accurately measuring time on ships at sea. In DRIFT TILT, pendulums of steel and stone guide the viewer through a tipping landscape, keeping time, hinting at unseen forces, and suggesting direction just like one of Lorenz’s tidal navigations.
The exhibition also features Lorenz’s new works on paper. Using Gyotaku and Urauchi, traditional methods of printing with natural objects, she captures the surfaces of marine debris. The immediacy of the process creates an index of the material itself, a direct and tactile record of form. The perfect flatness of the prints defamiliarizes these everyday surfaces, reestablishing our connection to a floating discarded world.
Marie Lorenz (b. 1973, Twentynine Palms, CA) lives and works in New York City. Recent solo exhibitions include Confluence at the Center for Contemporary Art, Montbéliard, France; the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York; the Suzanne Lemberg Usdan Gallery at Bennington College, Vermont; and Rib Gallery in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Group exhibitions include Shifting Shorelines at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University, New York, NY, and The Sorcerer’s Burden: Contemporary Art and the Anthropological Turn, at The Contemporary in Austin, Texas. Lorenz’s long-running project, Tide and Current Taxi navigates the waterways of New York City using tidal currents to propel her handmade boat. This artwork, her sculptures, and her video explore urban landscapes and human interactions with the environment. Lorenz earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995 and an MFA from Yale University in 2002. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Capital, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2008, Lorenz was awarded the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize for the American Academy in Rome.