Part 2 of 4: Christine Lorenz
The Space Between Things
This is Part 2 of a four-part series leading up to Ambiguous Boundaries, an upcoming exhibition hosted by Mark Rengers Gallery. Each part explores how artists, past and present, shape the way we see the world, building toward the work on view in the exhibition.
There are moments, quiet ones, often unannounced, when the world shifts.
Not dramatically. Not in a way that calls attention to itself. But subtly, almost imperceptibly, the familiar begins to feel unfamiliar. The surface of things gives way to something deeper. A texture becomes a landscape. A material becomes a question.
For Christine Lorenz, this shift is not an accident. It is the work.
Before photography, Lorenz studied English, drawn to language as a way of understanding the world. But language, as she describes it, has its limits. There are ideas, especially those rooted in perception, that resist easy articulation. She points instead to something closer to experience: the idea that each of us lives within our own field of perception, participating in a shared world while never seeing it in quite the same way.
Her photographs begin there.
At first glance, her work appears vast, even cosmic. Swirling formations suggest galaxies, aerial landscapes, or geological surveys of distant terrain. But the truth is more disorienting. These images are made from materials we encounter every day and rarely notice. Salt. Plastic. Residue. The overlooked.
What Lorenz offers is not transformation, but attention.
Using macro photography, she moves closer, so close that recognition begins to dissolve. Objects lose their identity. Scale collapses. What remains is something hovering between presence and absence, a photograph that feels like it might be of nothing at all.
And yet, it is never nothing.
It is salt, for instance, common, handled, consumed, scattered. A material so familiar it becomes invisible. But under magnification, it reveals structure, pattern, and a quiet complexity that echoes far beyond its origin. In one instance, a simple experiment growing salt crystals for a child’s science project led to an image that resembled a galaxy.
This is where Lorenz’s work deepens.
Because salt is not just salt. It is geological. It is mined from the earth, shaped over millions of years, entangled with the same subterranean systems that produce oil. It moves through our bodies, our roads, our waterways. It exists simultaneously as something intimate and something immense.
And in Lorenz’s hands, it becomes a way of seeing.
There is a memory she returns to often, her father, trained in geology, pointing out the layers of rock along a highway. Explaining, with quiet excitement, how the earth itself is in motion. How everything we stand on is the result of forces unfolding over time.
That way of seeing, of recognizing motion, pattern, and time embedded in the landscape, finds its way back into her work, even years later.
Because what her photographs ultimately ask is simple, but not easy.
What are we actually looking at?
A fragment of plastic, photographed closely enough, becomes something unrecognizable, no longer an object, but a field of light and color. A salt crystal becomes a terrain. The smallest thing contains the suggestion of something vast.
We are, as she describes it, always in between scales. Between the microscopic and the cosmic. Between what we can perceive and what we cannot.
Her work exists in that in between.
But just as important as what we see is how we experience it.
Lorenz speaks about a moment from graduate school that has stayed with her. The best thing art can do is give time.
It is a deceptively simple idea.
To stand in front of one of her photographs is not to consume it quickly. It asks something of you. It asks you to slow down. To adjust your perception. To let go of the need to immediately understand.
And in return, it offers something rare, a different experience of time itself.
Not the accelerated, fragmented time of screens and scrolling images, but something more grounded. More physical. More real.
This distinction matters deeply to her.
In a world where images are increasingly generated, manipulated, and detached from physical reality, Lorenz holds onto the importance of the photograph as an object, something that exists in space, that you can stand in front of, that you can experience with your body as much as your eyes.
Because perception, she reminds us, is not passive.
It is something we participate in.
And perhaps that is the quiet power of her work.
Not that it shows us something new, but that it teaches us how to see what has been there all along.
Closing
An opening reception for Ambiguous Boundaries will be held on Friday, April 3 from 6 to 8 pm in the First National Bank Exhibition Hall.
The exhibition will be on view from April 3 through May 30, 2026 at the First National Bank Exhibition Hall in Sewickley, featuring the work of Christine Lorenz and Kristen Letts Kovak, hosted by Mark Rengers Gallery in collaboration with Sweetwater Center for the Arts, and graciously sponsored by First National Bank. A portion of sales from the exhibition will support the Youth Arts Possibilities Program (YAPP), an initiative run by Sweetwater Center for the Arts and sponsored by First National Bank.
This exhibition invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and experience these works in person, where scale, material, and time can be fully felt.
In addition to this exhibition, a second exhibition will be on view in the same space, A Showcase of Sweetwater’s 2026 Master Class Artists, presented in partnership with Sweetwater Center for the Arts. Both exhibitions will be celebrated during the shared opening reception on Friday, April 3 from 6 to 8 pm.
For more information and access to the exhibition, please contact Mark Rengers Gallery at 412-741-5858 or email info@markrengersgallery.com
Resources
Powers of Ten
Originally developed as both a book and a short film by Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten explores scale by moving outward and inward from a single point in the universe in increments of ten. The work provides a visual and conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between the microscopic and the cosmic.Christine Lorenz
To learn more about Christine Lorenz’s work and ongoing projects, visitors can explore her official website and portfolio.Mark Rengers Gallery
For more information on current and upcoming exhibitions, including the work of Christine Lorenz and Kristen Letts Kovak, please visit the gallery’s website.
So fascinating!