Meredith James
15 Mar - 13 Apr 2014
MEREDITH JAMES
Land Lock
15 March - 13 April 2014
Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to premiere Land Lock; an installation by Meredith James consisting of a video triptych and an anamorphic floor sculpture.
In the video “Delmar,” James positions a play by Julia Jarcho about two families living in a landlocked small town within a set built to mimic the extreme foreshadowing and warping of space in medieval panel paintings. In Jarcho’s play the dialogue itself presents an unstable kind of reality. As roles change and understandings unravel within the plot, James’ elaborate and mutable set seems to undulate around the actors. The language vacillates between the surreal and the familial, so too does each room appear visually impossible and then normal.
It is the complicated dynamics involved in considering the spaces where theater, painting, and film occupy that orbit this piece. At its inception, film emerged from theater but quickly developed into a highly independent, differentiated medium. James’ video attempts to reexamine this relationship, taking another form of pictorial storytelling, medieval painting, as a model for the interaction between the stage and the moving image. In this installation it is asked that the viewers also engage with new surroundings, manifest their own narrative, and judge the contours of the world they find themselves acting within.
Meredith James (b. 1982) lives and works in New York. She holds an MFA from Yale University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recently, she has exhibited at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York, NurtureArts, Brooklyn, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. She is the recipient of the Abrons Art Center AIRSpace Residency and the Lighthouse Works Fellowship. In addition to her own practice, she is a curator and co-founder of Primetime Gallery in Brooklyn.
Land Lock
15 March - 13 April 2014
Jack Hanley Gallery is pleased to premiere Land Lock; an installation by Meredith James consisting of a video triptych and an anamorphic floor sculpture.
In the video “Delmar,” James positions a play by Julia Jarcho about two families living in a landlocked small town within a set built to mimic the extreme foreshadowing and warping of space in medieval panel paintings. In Jarcho’s play the dialogue itself presents an unstable kind of reality. As roles change and understandings unravel within the plot, James’ elaborate and mutable set seems to undulate around the actors. The language vacillates between the surreal and the familial, so too does each room appear visually impossible and then normal.
It is the complicated dynamics involved in considering the spaces where theater, painting, and film occupy that orbit this piece. At its inception, film emerged from theater but quickly developed into a highly independent, differentiated medium. James’ video attempts to reexamine this relationship, taking another form of pictorial storytelling, medieval painting, as a model for the interaction between the stage and the moving image. In this installation it is asked that the viewers also engage with new surroundings, manifest their own narrative, and judge the contours of the world they find themselves acting within.
Meredith James (b. 1982) lives and works in New York. She holds an MFA from Yale University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recently, she has exhibited at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York, NurtureArts, Brooklyn, and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. She is the recipient of the Abrons Art Center AIRSpace Residency and the Lighthouse Works Fellowship. In addition to her own practice, she is a curator and co-founder of Primetime Gallery in Brooklyn.