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 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. As an active, curious, and playful child, she learned how to perform the outdoor chores of shoveling snow, planting flowers, carrying water, pulling weeds, raking leaves, and stacking wood. It is likely that these seasonal activities and creative nuances had a profound effect on her which laid groundwork for her development of becoming a nature enthusiast and artist.
Lanzer is keen on concepts of measuring time, showing transition and transformation, referencing impermanence, and experiencing sense of place. She uses a varieties of materials and methods to connect with meaning and metaphor. Lanzer has identified herself as an installation artist since returning home to Dover from Albany where she attended State University New York for her Masters of Fine Arts in the 90’s. She exhibited work in Rochester’s artstream gallery which was one of the seacoast’s larger gallery spaces at the time. She also, independently, sought outdoor spaces to create and exhibit her site-specific art installations in Maine and New Hampshire.
Lanzer joined membership with The Art Center of Dover NH in 2021 for printmaking, print club, and community. She is currently working on a book project. It involves review and reflection of her unique visual language and universal themes which are rooted in the counterculture movement of the 1960’s and 70’s.