DRIFT TILT, a solo exhibition of works by Marie Lorenz, associate professor of Fine Arts, opened on October 11, at Jack Hanley Gallery in Tribeca. The show, on display through November 16, features collage and kinetic sculpture cast from debris washed up on New York City’s shores. The artworks in DRIFT TILT preserve impressions of discarded objects and reflect Lorenz’s ongoing exploration of the city by boat. For 20 years, Lorenz has been navigating New York Harbor in a plywood and fiberglass boat she built from scratch. Using the tides, she makes crossings, from river to river and from islet to islet, accompanied by loved ones, other artists, and volunteer participants.
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. Lorenz began experimenting with the pendulum as a tool for generating sound in 2022, during her collaboration on the opera Newtown Odyssey. A pendulum can regulate tempo and demonstrate the laws of motion. In practices like dowsing or divination, the pendulum 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.
DRIFT TILT 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 creating an index of the material itself, a direct and tactile record of form. The perfect flatness of the prints defamiliarizes these everyday surfaces, reestablishing a connection to a floating discarded world.
Lorenz’s New York show runs concurrently with her solo show CONFLUENCE at Le 19, Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain in Montbéliard, France, on view through January 5, 2025.
CONFLUENCE combines prints, sculptures, videos, and sound experiments to propose a narrative that represents a confluence of two industrial canals, one in New York and one in France. The walls of Le 19 are covered with large prints made from found objects using the Gyotaku direct ink transfer process. And a suspended installation incorporates fragments and debris from Montbéliard: The suspended boat and a video projection offer a story told by the “voice of the water” that unites the two landscapes in a single journey, the two places in a single protagonist.