Red Tide, 1992

Steel & Tide Detergent Bottles, each turtle app. 40 X 60 X 50”
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