Deborah Jack - Intertidal Imaginaries:
The Resistant Geographies of the Shore(coast) in the Aftermath of Saltwater(storm) surges
March 7th to May 26th, 2024
© Deborah Jack
Deborah Jack explores the shoreline of the (is)land as a liminal space. The fluidity of the water as it interacts with the shore and the lines that are created by that encounter as well as the temporal quality of those lines. Climate change has caused the warming of the oceans which has led to hurricanes that are more explosive in strength, last longer and storm surges that push further inland. The work engages ongoing questions that serve as a point of departure: Does water have memory? What is the resonance when the water and the land connect? If the hurricane is a natural memorial to the Middle Passage, a haunting. How can we re-imagine altered shoreline during the storm surge? The invasion of salt water beyond the shore. The merging of fresh and salt water bodies and the ecologies in-between that struggle to survive.
Opening Reception
Thursday, March 7th, 6pm – 8pm
About the Artist, Deborah Jack
Deborah Jack, is a St. Maarten and Jersey City based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology and climate change. Her current practice connects the effects of the hurricane storm surge in relation to coastal erosion, the saltwater inundation of intertidal spaces She imagines these rhizomatic, protective intersectional landscapes and wetlands as sites of resistance. This altered landscape, post surge, though temporary, is an exciting conceptual space regarding the intangible memory of water as it intersects with the land and the people who live there.
Her work was featured in the exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990’s-Today at the MCA Chicago and ICA Boston in Fall 2023. In Fall 2021 a retrospective, Deborah Jack: 20 Years was presented at Pen + Brush in New York City. She has exhibited at TENT Rotterdam, the Perez Art Museum of Miami in the 2019-2020 exhibition The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, Portland Art Museum, and Delaware Art Museum. Her work is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, MCA Chicago and the Smith College Museum of Art. She was an honored recipient of the 2023 Soros Art Fellowship. Additionally, she has been the 2023 Changing Climate Resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute, received the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, and served as an Artist-in-Residence for both the Surfpoint Foundation and Lightwork.
Deborah will participate in the upcoming exhibition, Hurricane Season, at The Des Moines Art Center. Later this fall, she will exhibit new works for the Prospect 6 Triennial, the future is present, the harbinger is home. Deborah is currently a Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.
With underwriting support from
Questions?
For questions about this exhibition, please contact André Ramos-Woodard,
Exhibitions and Programs Coordinator, at andre@hcponline.org or 713-529-4755, ext 16.