Waves — SPILL 180

WAVES
LORNA BAUER & ALANA ZACK
11/20/25 - 12/17/25

Spill 180 is pleased to present Waves, an exhibition of new works by Lorna Bauer and Alana Zack. The show brings together glass, photographic surfaces, painting and carved wood. It follows two artists who treat landscape as something formed through perception, memory and embodied encounter. Waves looks at how the world arrives in currents, both material and affective, and how these currents shape the forms we hold and return to.

For more than a decade, Montreal-based artist Lorna Bauer has explored the contact zone between architecture and botany, often beginning from specific sites shaped by gardens, terraces, and modernist experiments in dwelling. Through photography and sculptural glass forms, she works with reflections, transparencies, and the slow accretion of detail, translating the atmospheres of lived environments into images and objects that feel both precise and porous. In Bauer’s practice, plants, stones, facades, and fragments of built space become indices of larger ecologies and cultural histories, suggesting that every surface carries a record of how it has been inhabited.

Red Hook, Brooklyn-based artist Alana Zack approaches landscape from the scale of the body and the domestic. Drawing on her coastal upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area and training in photography and woodworking, Zack builds paintings and wooden reliefs that hover between dreamscape and diagram. Her works frequently stage thresholds: decks, shorelines, and tabletops that double as stages for gathering, solitude, and observation. Planes of color and grain operate like currents, pulling the eye across a scene that is at once familiar and estranged, as if glimpsed from the edge of waking.

The title refers loosely to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, in which inner life and external world shift, refract and echo across one another. Here, landscape appears as a moving field. Bauer’s glass and mirrored works track the movement of light across surface and structure, registering the instability of reflection and the intimacy of looking. Zack’s coastal paintings and driftwood assemblages mark the shoreline as a site of recollection and ongoing formation. Both practices move toward what Hal Foster calls “convulsive beauty,” where the ordinary is charged by a perceptual jolt or a shift in relation.

more than a place is rather a space

Waves is also informed by the matrixial thought of Bracha L. Ettinger, who writes of art as “a transport-station of trauma… more than a place, a space.” Each work operates as a temporary site where perception can open onto something shared and where the visible and the felt come into contact.

The works do not describe water directly. They turn to its logics: drift, erosion, return.