Installation of Deborah Jack at “A Thousand Secrets” exhibit in New York City.
NEW YORK/PHILIPSBURG--“A Thousand Secrets”, an immersive, multi-sensory exhibition which will run June 3 to July 30, at Apex Art in Church Street, New York City, and online, engages the sonic multiplicity and opacity of water as a provocation for alternative modes of collectively listening to a world in crisis. Curated by Mae A. Miller, the exhibit brings together works of St. Maarten artist Deborah Jack, as well as work by fellow artists Beatrice Glow, Renée Green, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Trevor Paglen and Tabita Rezaire.
From the maritime origins of the “quarantine” to undersea fibre-optic cables that mediate the Netflix Party and Zoom classroom, to the ship Evergiven’s blockage of the Suez Canal, oceanic infrastructure and crosscurrents have quietly structured the contemporary crises shaping our global social reality.
What does it mean to listen to global crises from the vantage point of oceanic currents? What histories of imperial extraction, racial-colonial violence and relationality come into focus as we listen through the waterline and across the storied waters of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean littorals? are some of the questions posed in the exhibit.
A Thousand Secrets is an immersive, multi-sensory exhibition that engages the sonic multiplicity and opacity of water as a provocation for alternative modes of collective listening to a world in crisis. The exhibit unsettles conventional listening devices to uncover entangled, non-linear histories of extraction and whispered traces of the otherwise through the transformative properties of the ocean.
Jack’s largest piece in the show is a re-installation of her 2004 work “Shore”, which comprises 2,500 to 3,000 pounds of salt, a 20-by-40-feet reflecting pool of water and three video projections.
On May 24, Pen and Brush published Deborah Jack: 20 Years, a retrospective catalogue, following the exhibition of the same name which opened at Pen and Brush in New York City on September 21, 2021.
For over 120 years, Pen and Brush has been the only international non-profit organisation offering an outlet for women in both the literary and visual arts in New York.
The catalogue is the first comprehensive publication dedicated entirely to exploring and contextualising two decades of Jack’s work. Featuring thoughtful, yet critical essays by Grace Aneiza Ali, Elizabeth DeLoughery, Jessica Lanay and Hershini Young, Jack is positioned exactly where she needs to be in the canon of art history: as a pioneer of visual nuance when it comes to ancestral memory, colonial histories and the role of land and sea in contemporary art.
In this exhibition catalogue, through the eyes of scholars, Pen and Brush and Jack herself, a record of a perspective-shifting artist at work is established. From the early 21st century to the present day, Jack’s photo, collage, video and installation works are laid out together for the first time, capturing the nexus of past – ancestral – traumas and present-day tensions.
The Caribbean and St. Maarten are featured prominently in Jack’s work, and in the essays surrounding it, but as much as Jack’s work is about the island, it is also a roadmap for addressing both present and past, universally.
An exhibition walkthrough is available at
www.vimeo.com/48705916.
