We are 60 percent water; Earth’s surface is 71 percent water; while water sustains us, and even IS us, our carelessness can turn it into an agent of our destruction. Throughout my working life, I’ve done performances, political activities, and skywriting about water and it’s importance our species and to the planet as a whole. Currently, I’m an image-maker, concerned with rivers as the veins and lifelines of the planet, and seas as the vast, living repositories of time, memory, the detritus of our habitation, as well as an embodiment of existential terror. I’m using iridescent textural materials — beads, tapestry threads, foil refuse — to suggest the physicality and reflective quality of water, beautiful, threatening, and threatened.
MY COMMITMENT TO WATER:
My practice at the intersection of art, science and the environment targets issues of climate change. Thus, water is integral to this focus.
Throughout the many decades of my career, bodies of water, (primarily observed from above) have fascinated me – from oceans along the coasts of California, Maine, Nova Scotia to Europe and Iceland. Rivers have been another source of inspiration, most particularly in the 1980’s when working on the Waterways of Pennsylvania project. The Bayous of Louisiana, the Everglades of Florida, as well as the Geddes run creek on my Bucks County property have fed my photography and painting practice.
Forty years ago, Betsy Damon stepped outside her traditional art training and carved a unique path to work with the environment, communities, science and art. She began looking to her inner consciousness as a source of inspiration which initiated her public engagement, starting with gritty art performances on the New York City streets. She was engaged in the women’s movement of the 1970s, where she founded No Limits for Women Artists, a network to join and support female artists.
Artist Statement
I collaborate with local communities around the world to focus on important water issues, especially rivers, waterborne diseases, water scarcity, and climate disruption. I work closely with scholars from numerous disciplines building rainwater harvesting systems; connecting communities and fostering dialogue along the entire length of rivers; filming and producing water documentaries; launching hand-carved ice books embedded with seeds into waterways; and creating waterborne disease projects, most recently in Egypt, Ethiopia, India, and Nepal. My working process occurs out in the field along streams and creeks.
Doug Fogelson studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago. His works are included in notable public and private collections such as The J. Paul Getty Center, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Center for Creative Photography and exhibited with esteemed galleries and museums. He has been recognized by publications including Art News, Photo District News, Art Forum, and AfterImage. Doug Fogelson founded and directed Front Forty Press, an independent publishing imprint, and has taught in the Photography Department of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Doug currently serves as President of the Board for Filter Photo.
I am currently working on a long-term research and exhibition project that examines the politics, traditions and practices surrounding water in a variety of global locations. The ambition for the project is to tease out the commonalities, local problems and interlinked futures of the so-called global north and south in the management and consumption of finite water resources.
WATER CONVERSATIONS is the umbrella term for this ongoing series of projects. The projects address issues of water through political, social and cultural lenses and aims to build an alternative global commons map through water. Articulated as a series of actions, small sculptures, posters, drawings, sound works, public interventions and site specific works the project explores the complex interstices between landscape and geopolitics, science and technology, culture and tradition. Read More
We are embodied water, and yet when we think of who we are, we do not understand this critical fact. We need water as a baseline for our survival. To perceive our oneness with water, we are exploring our own unconscious minds in order to understand the consciousness of water. The idea that water is just a resource to profit from and abuse shows how detached we are from our mother earth. We pollute, waste, and disregard water’s necessity for all of life. To experience our intimacy with water, we have to return to our dreams, to spirituality and to art. As humans we are always trying to change, evolve, or present ourselves in different ways. Water, on the other hand, changes states in a way that seems magical to us, and has much to teach us. It is possible to think as water rather than about water.
Water helps create our culture and our memories through its inclusion in our cultural and spiritual traditions. We believe water is our equal. The element of water allows us to see our reflection in it, to see our human form. It serves us as a mirror. Water Journeys explores this idea through memory and mirrors, both real and metaphorical. We use performance, video, and images that behave as Rorschach images through mirroring. We engage others to share their water journeys with the group using artistic means. As we explore our responses, we listen to the messages water has for each of us, and understand its critical role in our identity.
our websites: www.frederickafoster.com www.gianagonzalez.com
Flow is a community engagement and participatory art project created and directed by Naoe Suzuki, a visual artist based in the Boston area in Massachusetts, USA.
This project began in 2015. In this project, Naoe asks participants to think about their relationships with water and type their stories using a manual typewriter. In exchange, participants get an original work of art with stories by other people that were retyped. Read More
Aviva Rahmani, PhD
Watch Blued Trees: https://vimeo.com/135290635
http://www.abladeofgrass.org/.
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www.gulftogulf.org <http://www.gulftogulf.org/>
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