Deborah Jack: On Water, Memory, & Resistant Geographies

Join MCA Denver exhibiting artist Deborah Jack for a public lecture on the occasion of her exhibition Deborah Jack: a haunting of estuaries…an (after)math of confluence, on view through February 15th. Citing examples from her video installations, photography, and poetry, Jack will explore how water holds memory and the politics, histories, and flux around where water and land meet.

Examining several of her projects from the last twenty years, Jack will discuss the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean—their movements, forms, and elements, as poetic entry points to understanding natural phenomena such as hurricanes and storm surges. Often looking to the landscape of St. Martin as a conceptual focus, Jack describes shorelines as “resistant geographies” that defy the colonial legacies of mapping, ownership, and borders.

Image: Deborah Jack, a sea desalts, creeping in the collapse...in the expanse...a rhizome looks for reason...whispers an elegy instead, 2024 (video still). Commissioned by Prospect.6. Image courtesy of the artist and Prospect New Orleans.

About the Artist

Deborah Jack is a multidisciplinary artist whose work includes video installation, photography, and text. Her practice engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology, and climate change.

Born in 1970, Rotterdam, Netherlands, Jack lives in Cole Bay, St. Maarten and Jersey City, New Jersey. 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.