GARRISON, NY.- Garrison Art Center presents Rising Tide, a solo exhibition of twelve works on paper made over the past four years by visual artist and educator Julie Harrison. Driven by curiosity and adventure, Harrison has spent her career investigating materials to mine their visual and physical attributes, playing with changing forms of expression and experimenting with the new. This process has guided the evolution of her work over the years, moving from early video art and performance into drawing.

“My work explores invisible structures that shape organic life and ecological systems,” said Harrison, “I visually interpret this through layered, abstract lines and shapes that map energetic exchanges to construct fragments of an imagined biology. My drawings combine graphite and ink with digitally-sourced imagery of microscopic organisms, maps, brain activity, and my own cutout shapes.” She continues, ”These fragments serve as raw-material for abstraction and conceptual exploration. The resulting compositions are improvisational, intuitive, and process-driven as I crop, paste and draw onto paper. Rising Tide includes selections from my Brain Series, Landforms Series, and Coastal Series. The finished works are abstract and only partly recognizable. They reflect the fluidity of biology and the entanglement of nature, imagination, and human intervention.”

From the statement about the artists’ book: “Ghost Coast: A Hurricane Sandy Periplus of Lower Manhattan, 2026 is a collaboration between Harrison and poet E.J. McAdams and publisher Granary Books. The artists' book features a multi-panel, 45 inch artwork of Manhattan's coastline as impacted by Hurricane Sandy, accompanied by a poem by McAdams composed entirely of verbs describing water movement. An experimental verbal and visual remembrance of the coastline reconfigured by Hurricane Sandy, Ghost Coast is also a warning that the precipitating condition of climate change that led to the flooding and accompanying loss of life has not yet been addressed adequately and therefore haunts the surfaces of these now dry streets. (Periplus is a manuscript document or logbook used by ancient navigators that lists in order the ports, coastal landmarks, and approximate sailing distances along a shoreline.)

Julie Harrison is a New York City-based visual artist whose work probes science and technology to explore the dualities of nature and artifice. She has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, including solo shows at the Southern Vermont Arts Center, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, and Wekalet Behna in Egypt, as well as museum group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the New Museum, and the Staatliche Museum in Germany. Harrison is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, alongside artist residencies at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale in Norway. For eighteen years, she was a professor of art at Stevens Institute of Technology, where she founded the Art & Technology B.A. program.