PRESS RELEASE

LAND LOCK


Jack Hanley Gallery
327 Broome St, New York, NY


March 15 - April 13, 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.



PRESS:

Ken Johnson, “Puralism, With Bug Zappers and Doll People; A Critic’s Guide to the Best of the Lower East Side, The New York Times, April 3, 2014.  

Maria Rapoport, “A Million Little Pieces,” ArtSlant, April 4, 2014.