About
“Kris Lanzer [makes art] about the “overlap” between “inner and outside worlds” and her pursuit of “creating a sense of harmony” in her installations. There’s the pull from the outside and its sensory stimuli and the “imagined landscape” she summons in the studio. Lanzer’s installations negotiate these tensions and indeed intervene in the urban environment, creating new experiences for the viewer. Interstitial areas and transitional moments are central to her work, which often has ritualized dimensions, exploring dichotomies such as public and private, city and nature, inside and outside, beginning and end, life and death.”
Véronique Plesch, editor, Maine Arts Journal, 2022
Kris Lanzer is a Dover, NH resident, artist, and gardener. She moved to Dover after graduating from the University of New Hampshire with a Fine Arts degree. Lanzer grew up in Maine after her parents moved her family there in the 1960’s, from Rhode Island, to be in the heart of New England’s paper industry. She remembers noisy and stinky field-trips in grammar school to the regional pulp mill. An active, curious, and playful child, she was taught to help out and do chores. She preferred the ones outside like shoveling snow, planting flowers, pulling weeds, raking leaves, painting chairs, and stacking wood. These seasonal activities had a profound effect on her which laid the groundwork for her becoming the nature enthusiast and self-disciplined artist she is today.
Lanzer is keen on concepts of measuring time, showing transition and transformation. She references impermanence, and sense of place. She uses a variety of materials and methods to connect meaning and metaphor. Lanzer has identified herself as an installation artist since returning home to Dover NH from Albany NY where she attended State University New York for her Masters of Fine Arts in the 90’s.
Rochester NH’s artstream gallery, which was one of the larger gallery spaces at the time, helped Lanzer by exhibiting her Art Installations, a genre which was new to the seacoast art scene in the 90's. They were supportive and excited for Lanzer to build this impermanent and experiential work. It was a new experience for them and the viewer. She was later invited to create and exhibit her work at 55 Mercer St Gallery in New York City, the Barn Gallery in Ogunquit Maine and Bedrock Gardens in Lee New Hampshire.
Lanzer is currently focused on writing a book about relationship with her garden muse, of returning to and reconnecting with the continuity of its creative life force.