By Ayva Strauss
We each interact with water everyday in various contexts—we fill water bottles, take showers and drive by the Susquehanna River. And yet, perhaps because of its ubiquity, we rarely think about water after we turn off the faucet. The “Flow” exhibit, which will fill the Lore Degenstein Gallery until Oct. 13, takes water out of the background and places it front and center in novel ways that invite introspection. The collection, which is composed of pieces by four artists—Naoe Suzuki, Allie E.S. Wist, sTo Len and Stacy Levy—places waves, lakes and rain in interesting visual and auditory media, immersing the observer and encouraging them to think about their relationship with water.
Unlike other art exhibits I have encountered, “Flow” feels interactive, like a dynamic conversation between the artists and their audience. Perhaps the best example of this is the wall covered in distressed book pages, splattered in blue paint. It is part of a project that Naoe Suzuki began in 2015, in which she places a typewriter and a desk in the middle of the exhibit and invites anyone walking through to contribute by typing out their answer to a simple question: “what is your relationship with water?” Some write that “all aspects of water excite me,” while others mention “calm” and “chaos” in the same sentence. If you write your own response, the gallery’s attendants will hang it on the wall and give you one of the other pages to take home, making the piece feel almost alive. Another of Suzuki’s pieces, a set of recordings of serene scenes with water in the foreground, has a bench placed in front of it, inviting its audience to take a seat and sink into thought about water.
While Suzuki’s wall captures water as we know it, Allie E.S. Wist’s photographs document what water might look like on a future Earth, drastically altered by climate change. There are two distinct sets of framed photographs on display. The first three feature soft and warm amber tones, crystalline structures and cracked, sandy grounds, contrasted by the vibrancy of green, yellow and magenta cacti. These three are included in a work that Wist calls “Drought.” Each one is meant to represent a part of what life might look like in sections of the world that climate change leaves with very little water. A piece of paper next to the exhibit explains that the pictures, which (intentionally) look like they belong on the glossy pages of a feature spread in a cuisine magazine, are not a random, stylish choice, but, in fact, a well-researched representation of the kinds of foods, like cacti and breadfruit, that can thrive with very little water. The next three photos are from Wist’s collection entitled “Flooded” and thus have very much the opposite aesthetics—cool, dark tones and the shine of water in place of matte desert. The explanatory papers tell us that what looks like the bottom of a green riverbed is actually a shot of types of edible seaweed, while what appears to be a stone sitting in a dish is actually an accessible method for making salt water digestible. Both of these might become essential for regions of the world where sea levels rise and being completely surrounded by water becomes a reality.
Much like Wist’s art, sTo Len’s pieces are full of intrigue, and become even more meaningful once it’s clear what you are looking at. There is a cloth draped from the ceiling and spilling onto the floor that Len calls “Future of a Material.” It looks like a geometric textile created with random swatches of dark, black paint, but, in fact, the shapes were not created with a brush. Instead, they are the imprints of objects that the artist found discarded in bodies of water, meant to represent that throwing debris in the ocean does not get rid of it at all, it only harms perhaps our most important natural resource. Next to the cloth , there are framed pieces that have undergone a marbling effect, with swirls of dark brown and gray intertwining with white. These works are produced by hovering the blank canvas at the surface of waterways in New York City and allowing them to take on the patterns left by ocean pollution, based on the Japanese technique called “Tsunaminagashi.” Len recognizes that often pollution is somewhat invisible, and thus difficult to assign responsibility for. Through his art he brings to light the ugly consequences even if they are not visible day-to-day.
The final piece you come to if you follow the exhibit in a clockwise circle , is perhaps the one that draws the most visual interest initially. It is constructed by Stacy Levy, who often thinks of water in the framework of a human body. Perhaps that is why, before you read the description on the wall or watch the video on the iPad in front of it, it looks like a representation of a human spine with each nerve being a little glass bottle. It is several feet tall and has a sort of eerie beauty. The explanatory sheet will tell you that all of the tiny, clear vials filled with water actually form an aerial vision of our local bodies of water. The iPad plays a video documenting the process of Levy and volunteers from Susquehanna University going out and collecting buckets of water from places like the main stem of the Susquehanna River, Rolling Creek Run, Turtle Creek, Bull Run, and about half a dozen others. They then meticulously filled the tiny vials with the water—you can see sediment floating around or settled at the bottom of many of them—and structured it such that vials are placed along the lines of the rivers and creeks, just as they would if you were looking at our town from above. There is clear care and thought in the piece and you would not encounter a perspective like this in nature, which makes it interesting and evocative.
