In
her second solo exhibition at Safe-T-Gallery, Brooklyn-based artist
Hilary
Lorenz uses the physical and visceral experiences of hiking
through remote natural landscapes as the touchstones of a remarkable
new series of etchings, woodcuts and water-based drawings, “Tracing
Nature.” The drawings and prints are cognitive maps of specific
regions, (the Adirondacks of New York and the Jemez Mountains of New
Mexico) and document both the changing weather, the sounds of nature,
isolation, and the passage of time through the changing environment.
But the images created with Lorenz’s characteristic, near-obsessive
marks, lines and circles, are abstract and intuitive; they are as much
time-lines of internal journeys, infused with feats of personal endurance
and strength as they are external depictions of the land.
Lorenz writes, “The topographical nature of my work, both imagined
and natural, evolves from my subconscious as I shape and transform the
two-dimensional space with the memory of my own physical experiences
of how my body moves through space, whether it is the crowded streets
of Manhattan or the rigorous Southwestern mountain terrain. My physical
body holds the memory of experience that I then decode in my artwork
to explore the notion of transience, chance, and difference.”
Hilary Lorenz received her MFA from the University of Iowa. She has had
numerous group and solo exhibitions in the United States, Europe and
Asia. Recent museum group shows include: the Santa Fe Art Institute,
New Mexico; the Taiwan Museum of Art and the Frans Masereel Centrum,
voor Graphische Kunst, Belgium. Lorenz has been awarded grants and fellowships
from the Fulbright Foundation, the NEA-MidAtlantic Foundation, the Miskolc
Museum of Contemporary Art in Hungary, and the Lower East Side Printshop,
New York. She has collaborated on books and broadsides with poets Elaine
Equi, Albert Mobilio, and Gerrit Henry. Her artwork has been reviewed
in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Art in America, and Art on
Paper. The prints in this exhibition were produce during a one-year,
fully funded, printmaking residency at the Lower East Side Printshop
in New York City.
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©Hilary
Lorenz