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 four geographically distant places: Maine, Louisiana, Brazil (Belém), 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.