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’ 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.
For me, this aspect of the piece is just as important as the gallery presentation. I wanted to enlarge the scope of the work by bringing it physically outside the museum into shared public spaces, and to extend its time horizon beyond this exhibition by permanently embedding these books into the library system.
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.
