text by Maria Rapoport

There’s an urgency to The Exit, a new solo show by Meredith James at Marinaro on view through December 13, that feels both existential and claustrophobic.

The show’s mood implies the opposite of its title and evokes the spirit of that Sartre play in which characters and audience collectively discover that “Hell is other people.”

While the work isn’t political, our current moment insists on–won’t let us look away from–how inescapably we’re bound together by each other’s choices/perspectives/actions–an epiphany concretized by the current president’s dismantling/rebuilding of America’s most familiar building.

James, whose past work has anachronistically forced Vermeer-like spaces into disorienting Ames-room configurations and myriad other illusions, has found the right place and time for art that disturbs our sense of place and time. Comprising a series of photographs and intricate wall-mounted dioramas, The Exit depicts rooms you’d really want to leave: dingy offices with mold-stained drop ceilings, whose workers have long gone, and movers have removed the desks and chairs computers and printers, and all that’s left are some scraps of litter and bare electrical outlets.

Also remaining: the Exit signs that, presumably, guided the workers away, and now glow through these dead spaces like a planet’s last sunset. James invents endless ways to confuse their message through inversion, reflection, competition with fellow Exit signs and built-in contradiction between their directing arrows and walls and halls whose forced/fragmented/impossible perspective pushes toward windows that seem to imply outside light, then gets confused and returns to start. 

It’s the intricacy/complexity/challenge of these pieces that highlights a ticklish feeling we might have sensed before we entered the gallery and will have been attuned to as we exit: together, we’ve come to this hopeless place, but surely we can figure something out.

Meredith James
South 36° East (Column, Low Wall), 2021 Inkjet print
15 x 18.75 inches
38.1 x 47.6 cm

Meredith James
North 70° East (Low Wall, T-Shaped Wall), 2021 Inkjet print
15 x 18.75 inches
38.1 x 47.6 cm

Meredith James
North 70° East (Low Wall, T-Shaped Wall), 2025
Wood, aluminum, acrylic paint, magic sculpt, plastic film, led lights 25 x 25 x 10.25 inches
63.5 x 63.5 x 26 cm

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BIOS

Meredith James completed her AB at Harvard University and her MFA at Yale University.  She had a museum exhibition at the Queens Museum, NY and has had solo shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, NY; LaMontange Gallery, Boston; and Marc Jancou, NY.  She has installed major public art projects at Socrates Sculpture Park, NY; The Rose Kennedy Greenway, Boston; and Lieu Histrorique National Center-Brébeuf, Quebec City.

Maria Rapoport is a psychoanalyst and writer. Her psychoanalytic writing has been nominated for the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis Gradiva Award and received the National Institute for the Psychotherapies Educator’s Award. Her literary work has appeared in publications including Bomb, the Brooklyn Rail, and The Iowa Review. She received an Iowa Review Award in creative nonfiction and has been awarded fellowships by the Edward Albee Foundation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program.