WATER BIOGRAPHY (selected volumes) Chazen Museum of Art February-July, 2020.
I exhibited twelve volumes from my Water Biography in a group show which asked artists to present their work in relationship to a piece in the museum’s collection. I chose a photo (November 2008) from Renate Aller’s series Oceanscapes – One View – Ten Years, and built a custom floating shelf to match the length of the photo’s horizon. The water books, like the photograph, offer a frame for our view of these immense bodies of water, and present an alternate landscape rooted in material instead of image.
Concurrent with this exhibition, 2 water books were added to UW-Madison Libraries’ permanent public collections: Atlantic Ocean (N7433.4.F589 A85 2019) is held on reserve at the Kohler Art Library, and Lakes Michigan and Superior are available for checkout at the Wisconsin Water Library. Embedding these books in the library system enlarges the scope of the project by bringing this work outside the museum into a shared public realm. Water circulates, and books circulate. These objects can now be taken into the private, personal spaces of people's homes as a circulating work of land art - linking one's personal, domestic realm with outdoor bodies of water.
