what is the value of water if it quenches our thirst to bloom...

This is the journey of a young girl around an island. She is both ancestor and descendent. Her journey begins inland, and she makes her way to shore only to return to the center. Her impulse is to perform this ritual as a form of re/membering what was lost/ forgotten. She travels across visible and invisible boundaries until she comes to the shore. The shore line literally represents the edges of the island, which represents the transitional space of departure and arrival.

It is a season of the bloom. Their presence in limited.The flowers are at once metaphors for the wounds of history combined and the beauty of regeneration. The roots dig deep, the tree is nurtured and blossoms erupt on hillsides, in valleys and flesh. Echoing the dichotomy of the Caribbean landscape, the vital foliage cloaks the soil that nurtures and buries our histories.

My work explores the relationship of the natural world to memory, personal and cultural. How does nature create memorials for the small and large histories that occurred. The hurricane, the sea, the shore, the land and the flora all play a role. In these narratives I've created the seasonal memorial.

Cycles of memory.

Deborah Jack received her M.F.A. from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is an artist whose work is based in photography, painting, video/sound installation, and text. Her work deals with trans-cultural existence, memory, re-memory and nature. She has had residencies at Lightwork and Big Orbit Gallery Summer Artist in Residence. She has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund of the Netherlands Antilles. She was a fellow at The Photography Institute-National Graduate Seminar. Her work is part of the Lightwork Collection, the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, and the collection of the Island Government of St. Martin. Her art has been exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, internationally including major group exhibits at SITE Santa Fe, the Jersey City Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. She has published two poetry collections: The Rainy Season and skin. She has participated in the Utan Kayu Literary Bienale in Jakarta, Indonesia, the Global Poetry Festival in Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa and Winternacthen Literary Festival in The Hague, the Netherlands. Deborah Jack is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at New Jersey City University where she teaches photography classes.

http://deborahjack.com