Deborah Jack’s solo exhibition (her first in Colorado) includes a dynamic, six-channel video installation featuring tumbling waters and fauna from the shorelines of three geographically distant places: Maine, Louisiana, and the island of St. Maarten. Entitled a sea desalts, creeping in the collapse… in the expanse…a rhizome looks for reason… whispers an elegy instead, 2024, this installation offers a meditation on the dynamic nature of coastlines and humanity’s relationship to water. 

Jack is a multidisciplinary artist whose artistic practice includes video installation, photography, and text. She engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology, and climate change. For her exhibition at MCA Denver, Jack’s photography and videos combine footage from the coastline of Jack’s home of St. Maarten with the shores of York, Maine and the shorelines of Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur (a lake created by a man-made disaster), as well as Louisiana’s Neptune Pass and Quarantine Bay (areas of the Mississippi delta where the land made from river sediment continues to rebuild despite human interventions). Along the coastlines of Louisiana, Maine, and St. Maarten, land is rapidly disappearing and changing due to erosion, warming ocean waters, and hurricanes. Meanwhile, in Louisiana’s river delta, Neptune Pass and Quarantine Bay offer unexpected examples of where the land is naturally repairing itself. These shifting edges of where the water meets the land underscores the limitations of humans’ ability to control nature.

About the artist

Born in 1970, Rotterdam, Netherlands, Jack lives in Cole Bay, St. Maarten and Jersey City, New Jersey. Deborah Jack received an MFA from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2002. Her work has been featured in significant exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, MA; the Houston Center of Photography, TX; and other renowned institutions. In 2021, a retrospective, Deborah Jack: 20 Years, was presented at Pen + Brush in New York, NY. Her work is in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Des Moines Art Center, IA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; and the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA. Jack was a 2023 Changing Climate Resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute and a Surf Point Foundation artist-in-residence. She is a recipient of a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (2024), a Soros Arts Fellowship (2023), a Jersey City Artist Grant (2022), and a Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2021). Jack is currently a Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.

Dive Deeper:

Watch Deborah Jack: The Duality of Nature on PBS