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Red
Tide, 1992
Steel & Tide
Detergent Bottles, each turtle app. 40X60X50”
 The
shelves of our supermarkets abound with giddy optimism. Natural
phenomena like Dawn, Ivory Snow, Tide, Breeze, Era, & Surfenter
our lives as we scrub our cocoons, helping usdistance ourselves
as generators of water pollution. These turtlesbodies are composed
of the things that destroy their habitat, referring to the
way we define them in the context of scarcity, thereby contributing
to their disappearance.
Turning
Milk Into Water
Planning for the
future of a great metropolis, NYC eyed the Catskills for a water source
as early as the 1920’s. It took until the early 1950’s to
condemn villages situated low in the valleys of Delaware and Ulster
to a fate of watery obscurity. The nature of mountain farming is unpredictability,
instability, lots of rocky wet soil, and weather extremes. Land at
the bottom of the valley is well irrigated, well drained and very fertile,
profoundly important in the vertical landscape. Therefore when the
great metropolis claimed the valley land as it’s own, an economic
downward spiral set in, pulling the area away from sustainable agriculture,
and the physical community of farm towns.
New York City has transformed the chief export of the region from Milk
into water. It reminded me of how we traded blood for oil in the Persian
Gulf. Now the city is placing more restrictions on the area, many of
which benefit both upstate and city dwellers, but many of which are draconian
and ridiculous. Instead of putting ever tightening screws on individuals
and towns, the city needs to develop and enhance natural filtration through
the use of blue belt waterways acting as bio filters. Before we build
the new $7 Billion filtration plant in the Bronx lets consider giving
the earth a chance and help it do what it does best by cleansing itself.
Water cleaning technology in this country relies on magic bullet / overkill
strategy, not sustainability. The technology we actually use is generations
behind what we know about green systems, but it’s easier to write
a check to a chemically doused contractor than take a chance that a biological
solution would work better in the long run. After all, trees don’t
have to get paid off to continue to show up for work everyday.
So I altered these antique milk bottles, to create my own dairies. Establishments
that recognize the fishy smell of an area made invisible, consumed by
a thirsty city. Drained of their milk for decades, the bottles are pictured
here with their new cargo, tapwater from a city faucet.
Tap
Water Expose
previously
published in World War 3 Illustrated Issue # 29 Land |
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Tidal
Filter Fence
 NYC
Percent for Art project in collaboration with the Dept of Environmental
Protection at Coney Island Water Pollution Control Plant. Tidal
Filter Fence takes it’s it’s form from the natural
ebb and flow of the tidal wetland area adjacent to the enormous
sewage treatment plant perpetually under construction since the
50’s. When it works well, the plant seeks to do what the
wetlands do naturally: to settle out particles and re-oyxgenate
the water. Will it be built? Good Question.
Surface
World , 1995
It’s
the things you can’t see that you should worry about.
Series
of blown glass shells in welded steel frames.
Size shown 14”X11”X12”5.
Turtle
Shell with Ziplock Bag, 1993 
Often sea turtles
are suffocated when they ingest plastic debris, mistaking it for
jellyfish. Using the structure of the plastic bag, turtle shell and
the water itself, I tried to make an object which appeared to hover
between life and death. Steel & water 15
X14 X 5”
Sculpture
to Last a Lifetime, 1990
Synthetic Water, and Technobabble, and Wave of the Future
 I
noticed in the supermarket that water is more expensive than milk. Wandering
through the aisles, I marveled at the marketing behind designer drinking
water, how the contents are the same, but the real product is the advertising.
The contents of this product is rapidly consumed, leaving an empty vessel,
a cast off plastic bottle will exist for eons after the water is consumed
much the way a shell infinitely outlives it’s original inhabitant
each approx. 28X27X32”steel, plastic, made
with recycled materials.
Water
Glasses, 2000
Commonly found
protozoans Giardia & Cryptosporidium, a Swimming Duck leaving
his droppings in a simulated reservoir, and some tanks of chlorine
and fluoride adorn these objects, describing pollutants found
in tap water. Each glass 7 X 3” shown here filled with NYC
Tap water see products
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