Karen Reimer: Sea Change by Maria Elena Buszek If many of Karen Reimer’s works in Sea Change make you want to run home and hide under the covers, that’s pretty much how she wants it. On several different levels. Most of the pieces in this exhibition were created during the Covid-19 pandemic when the artist—like most of us—was trapped at home: Zoom meetings for human contact, doom-scrolling the media for the news, scrutinizing her suddenly-shrunken environment with fresh eyes. And—again, like most of us—there were pleasures as well as panic in this new existence, which Reimer deftly infuses into this new body of work. The series’ focus on climate change began before the pandemic did. Indeed, several of the (doubly) recycled works in the exhibition began their lives as part of her 2017 Shoretime Spaceline installation at the Hyde Park Art Center, in which she drew attention to the building’s existence on the former site of the Chicago Beach Hotel, built as part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition on a foundation of sand dredged up from Lake Michigan. The hubris of this man-made “natural attraction,” establishing a disorienting new relationship between land, water, and sky, distance and time, is more disorienting still when one realizes how normalized often precarious sites like these have become across the post-Industrial urban landscape. Reimer’s research of rising tides and drought for this and other works led her toward more information on how rapidly the planet’s water sources and shorelines are changing. Overwhelmed by the almost incomprehensible scale of global climate change, there is a certain solace in the maps, charts, and graphs often enlisted to make sense of it.
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