Meredith James
Land Lock
March 15- April 12, 2014
Opening Reception
Saturday March 15, 6-8pm
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.
Meredith James in The New York Times, April 4, 2014