Christine Lorenz

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Christine Lorenz, detail, Dissolution 9 and Dissolution 2 (2021). Digital images, dimensions variable.

We tasted salt before we could name it, and it’s been cycling through our bodies ever since. Salt is a mineral that’s universally familiar, although most of the time we’re unlikely to think of it as something from the earth. The systems of industry and commerce that bring consumable salt to our daily lives have liberated it from its origins; we can have no idea whether it was evaporated on islands in the Caribbean or mined from beneath Lake Erie. In its purified form, it’s both commonplace and essential, and its familiar ways of dissolving in water and appearing again can make it feel like it has a life of its own. Leave it alone, and eventually it will reassemble itself in one form or another. It crystallizes in forms that reflect the changing circumstances. Over time. we’ve found countless roles for salt in our languages, in poetry, alchemical lore, and everyday figures of speech. We see our own human qualities in its ebbs and flows, in states that are always liable to change.

Christine Lorenz uses photography to examine the ordinary, overlooked, disposable, and forgotten. She earned her MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and BA at Ohio State University. Her photographs have been seen at photo-eye gallery in Santa Fe, in Pittsburgh galleries, and elsewhere across the United States and Europe. Online, her work has been featured by Vice, Photolucida, Rogue Agent Journal, Magenta Foundation and Humble Arts Foundation. She lives with her family in Pittsburgh, PA, where she teaches art history, the history of photography, and art writing at Duquesne University and Point Park University.

cmlorenz.com
@zatopa