Blublublublu

by Morgan Clifford

In BluBluBluBlu, Morgan Clifford weaves together patches of blue to capture her mental images of blue water and sky, suggesting a relationship between the color and memory. “I think in terms of color,” Clifford says. She finds particular resonance in the indigos, azures, and aquamarines of the waters. “I love water. I love the colors of it, swimming in it, floating on it, walking by it, seeing and hearing it pour down.”  Clifford connects the experience of being absorbed in weaving to being submerged. She is one of a number of artists in Many Waters to explore the relationship between water and weaving—a process dependent on water.

by way of water

by Moira Bateman

In Moira Bateman’s hand-dyed and waxed cloth assemblages, microscopic views of bogs, wetlands, lakes, and rivers become larger than life. Working at the intersection of art and ecology, the artist had an opportunity to collect and view microscopic specimens from lake bottom sediment alongside paleo-limnologists, scientists who use the records held within lake sediment to understand the timing and magnitude of environmental change. These lake scientists collect tubes that are several feet long, filled with layers of sediment dating back hundreds of years. This mud is rich with diatoms, single-celled algae, whose dead and resting cells are visible under the microscope.

After seeping and dying swaths of silk in lake water, lake bottom sediment, natural tannins, and iron, Bateman cuts and places the silk to replicate these microscopic views, but at large scale. She sets them with handstitched thread and beeswax. Bringing the past held within the microscopic into view, By Way of Water offers a unique way to “see” what is hidden to the naked eye and conscious mind.

Dark and Perfect Memory

by Tia-Simone Gardner

NFS

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it used to be.

-Toni Morrison

Like the Mississippi, “the Black body was remapped. Rearticulated through a range of regimes: racial capitalism, colonization, labor exploitation, into a site of extraction,” writes Tia-Simone Gardner in a genre-defying essay that is an extension of her interdisciplinary artistic practice of tracing Blackness in landscapes, above and below the ground’s surface.

Although invented in Europe, the paddle steamer is an emblem of the Mississippi. Romanticized representations of the steamboat appeared often in the writings of Mark Twain, who claimed that he dreamed of being a steamboatman as a boy. The vessel remains a nostalgic symbol of the pre-Civil War period.

Painting a steamboat model in matte gray, Gardner negates this image, as well as Twain’s celebratory representations of the Mississippi as a beacon of freedom in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and other writings.

The advancement of steamboat technology corresponded directly with the increase in enslaved Black people, making it possible to move bodies and goods up the river—other inland riverboats depended on downward flow. Those with shallow-drafts increased inland access, as they did not require a deep-water port. As a result, the steamboat vastly expanded the market for cotton and other goods. Black people died in different states of unfreedom along the river, from river workers to slaves.

Gardner’s graffiti message takes Twain off his pedestal in the history of American literature and brings the steamboat into the Mississippi of our present, where Black lives are still being taken and Black stories are still being re-membered.

Currents I, II, III

by Ian Hanseworth

For almost a decade, Ian Hanesworth has filled sketchbooks with a meditative drawing practice, in which they create a series of concentric lines rippling out from center points. These drawings resemble topographical maps and the surface of water. These specific works were inspired by a spring near their parents’ farm. Hanesworth has written beautifully about their relationship to this body of water:

The spring is set back into the edge of the forest, where cold clear water emerges from the ground and makes its way over a landscape of moss-covered stones, rotting logs, and thick floating mats of watercress. Remnants of three stone walls partially enclose the space around the spring. The walls belong to an old spring house built more than a century before my parents raised me and my sisters in this valley. Spending our summer days wading in the spring, my sisters and I came to know the joy and pleasure of drinking wild water as it flowed out of the earth and into our bodies. Through the decaying stone walls and fragments of glass and pottery, we came to understand that people lived here in relationship with this water long before we did, and even long before the spring house was built. … I sought to capture the water’s ceaseless, gurgling energy in these prints. The intricacies of carving this abstract composition provided time and space to ponder the significance of this sacred water to me and my family, to all of the people that have lived in this valley before us, and to the people that I hope will come to know this clean, clear water for generations to come.

Fall-Cloud

by Lisa Nebenzahl

Fall/Cloud is one of four prints in Lisa Nebenzahl’s Looking Through series. In this body of work, she pairs photographs of the water and the sky, allowing us to observe both at the same time. A number of art works in Many Waters address the relationship between water and sky, including those by Morgan Clifford (to your left) and Karen Goulet (to your right). Nebenzahl took these photos in her backyard and at the Baptism River in northern Minnesota. The series plays with the idea of distance. She photographed water at a distance close enough to touch but at a location far away from her home, and paired these images alongside those capturing the distant sky taken from the artist’s home. This balance of near and far is echoed in the similarities between the images, each includes a sense of movement from the upper left corner to the lower right.

Float

by Presley Martin

At first glance, this work appears to be entirely natural in its composition. While the artist found these the materials in a natural environment, they are not rocks nor seashells as they may first appear. Float is a part of Presley Martin’s ongoing foam project in which he collects and documents the many forms of foam that can be found in the Mississippi River. Polystyrene (also known as Styrofoam) cups, packing peanuts, and insulation material are all relatively common finds, as are other forms of plastic waste. Martin hopes Float, and his nearby wall sculpture Out of Round, will inspire curiosity about plastic pollution and increase interest in environmental action.

Flooding in Alton, Illinois

by Billy Flynn

In 2015, the small river city of Alton, Illinois suffered significant flooding. In his picture of Alton, Billy Flynn captured the aftermath of what was a once-in-a-generation event, but now occurs every few years. Flynn calls it “the simple equation of climate change: warmer air holds more moisture, and more moisture causes more rain.” As the water subsides, it reveals the new infrastructure of necessity, sandbags. We can see just above them Morrison’s Irish Pub, trying to stay afloat in a newly dangerous landscape. Morrison’s looks like so many beloved local pubs, and Flynn’s image of it barricaded against rising waters is a vivid picture of the everyday toll of inaction to the climate crisis. The stop sign in the bottom right corner serves as both a futile plea to the rising water and a call to end climate change denial.

Generations

by Niki Pico

Niki Pico is a Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) and Dakhóta self-taught artist. Generations is a textile panel of traditional Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) appliqué design to represent the water spirit clan. In the artist’s words it speaks to “our respect, relationship and responsibility for one of our most precious natural resources.” A single red ribbon flowing down the center signifies the bloodline of generations.

Gooseberry Falls, may 2018-2019

brighton beach, kitchi gammi, may 2018-2019

by Jes Lee

In these photographs, Jes Lee documented Lake Superior from the same vantage point along the north shore once a month for one year. Each final image is composed of all twelve photographs, each month’s picture printed on top of the months before. Together they create a dreamlike, almost ethereal vision of the lake. As the artist has explained, these images capture “one full year of memories of the water and land.”

Like Lee, several artists featured in Many Waters, including Linda Gammell and Holly Newton Swift (whose works are on view in the larger gallery), return to a specific site over and over again as a central part of their artistic practice.

Pillsbury ‘A’ Mill

Reeds, Springbrook, Minnesota

Beavers Lodge

by Keith Taylor

Keith Taylor is a master of traditional photographic processes. These photographs are printed in platinum-palladium, a practice that dates back to the 1860s. Each print is hand-made by brushing the paper with an even coating of light-sensitive chemicals containing platinum and palladium metals and then exposing the negative to ultraviolet light. Due to the chemical properties of platinum and palladium, these prints do not weather and change as quickly as other kinds of photographs.

In these pictures, Taylor focuses on the subtle light around natural bodies of water and the way the water’s surface creates a smooth and reflective break in the texture of the landscape. During the printing process, he emphasized the rich shadows, giving the pictures a mysterious, even haunting quality.

Life Preserver (Child’s Size)

by Megan Vossler

Through seemingly simple forms, Megan Vossler’s most recent body of work contemplates the contradictory power of water. It connects, transports, carries, submerges, and drowns. It cleans, dilutes, and erodes. Growing up on the California coast, her favorite time to visit the ocean was during a storm, when the water was at its most unsettled. She would watch the surface contort and erupt as she looked for glimpses of what was underneath.

A child’s life preserver in heavy bronze, immediately conjures images of sinking. Ocean passageways sometimes shepherd and sometimes erase the migrant populations that look to them for hope.

Light Interplay

by Holly Newton Swift

For more than twenty years, Holly Newton Swift has journeyed to Cascade River Park in Lutsen, Minnesota, taking photographs of the waterfalls to use as reference materials for her large-scale charcoal drawings. Newton Swift has explained that she is drawn to waterfalls because of their inherent contradictions: they are revered as sacred spaces, beautiful, mesmerizing, yet they are also dangerous; they hold their form through their constant movement. Newton Swift captures the beauty of waterfalls in her subtle tones and elegant strokes and references its danger by the unexpected jagged edges and sharp lines throughout. She hints at the stability of the waterfalls by the grid that grounds the entire composition.

mermaid blues: sweet notes found in a bitter lament

by Karen Goulet

Each of Karen Goulet’s quilts has a story. Mermaid Blues is about the longings of sky and water during those particularly cold, short winter days in the Northwoods. The sky misses its reflections in the water and the water spirits wish to break free from icy covers. She pays tribute to that time at the end of the day when the sky fills with “colors of love” to create a “visual song” suspended in air.

Goulet has worked with fibers and textiles for most of her life and learned the craft from her family. “My love of needle and thread has traveled many generations.” An enrolled member of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation, she is also from Métis, Saami, and Finnish people. Her work pays tribute to her ancestors’ journeys and fierce wills to survive, as well as the waters that carried them to new places and defined their lives. “Rivers and lakes form and inform the stories I make, as they remember the ones who came before me.”

mississippi: book of hours

by Linda Gammell

Linda Gammell’s Mississippi: Book of Hours is a series of photographs of the river taken over the course of a decade. Each work from the series chronicles one day in the year from a bird’s eye view. Her notation system, 132/365, indicates which day the images were taken (in this case, May 12) and evokes the project’s goal of capturing a fragment of time. A Book of Hours, referenced in the project’s title, was a personal Christian prayer book of daily devotions that was popular in the Middle Ages. The artist has explained that, like a Medieval Book of Hours, this project is a “personal sacred way of marking deep time.” Gammell’s photographs evoke this sacred source material by including two poetic and contemplative images in each print, placed side-by-side like pages in an open book. Together, they seem full of potential and mystery, with dark, looming trees on the shoreline that lead to diverging paths in the water.

Missouri river: chamberlain

by Ethan Jones

Missouri River: Chamberlain is part of Ethan Jones’s series An Unsearchable Distance. The larger project is inspired by the numerous failed searches for the Northwest Passage—a sea route from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans around the northern rim of the American continent. For several centuries it was assumed the elusive passage was only just out of reach, beyond the rapids and seas of ice. Today, the long sought-after passage has opened up due to the destructive melting of polar ice over the top of North America. Jones sees the search for the Northwest Passage as a symbol of “a human desire to impose our will on something much larger than ourselves, without concern for results or its effects.” For this series, Jones seeks to capture images where the landscape appears malleable, under our influence, and in the midst of ongoing change. But in each image, there is an underlying sense of an ominous change, of plans gone awry, and the potential for destruction.

ripple effect

by Sarah Nassif

Collection of Great River Coalition

At the 2019 Great River Coalition Earth Day River Cleanup event, participants of all ages made a collective wish for water and the life it sustains. They wrote their thoughts on recycled cloth strips, folded, and dyed the strips using organic indigo and water from the Mississippi River, and wove these strings on a loom to create a collaborative fiber portrait of the river.

With a degree in botany, Sarah Nassif comes to art as an environmental educator and public artist, creating guided opportunities for people to engage the natural world and each other. In 2018, she began focusing on bodies of water and bringing people to their banks to create tactile objects using their hands and water in the process. She finds, and research supports, that the experience not only facilitates a greater sense of investment in the natural world but that it also supports mental health, facilitating calm and even joy.

This piece was commissioned by Great River Coalition and supported by a grant from Mississippi Watershed Management Organization. Learn more at greatrivercoalition.com and mwmo.org.

saint croix floodplain forest inundated

by Regina Flanagan

Regina Flanagan photographs landscapes over long stretches of time, exploring how changeable, yet resilient they are. Floodplains—like the one in Afton State Park along the St. Croix River pictured here—allow rivers the space to spread out and slow down. They store water in times of flooding, releasing it slowly over land and deep in the ground. These areas create rich, biologically diverse ecosystems of plants, fish, and birds; habitats are destroyed and new ones emerge with each flooding event.

Floodplain forests are dynamic systems that rely on disturbance for their health, yet in recent years a number of record-breaking disturbances have been attributed to changing global weather patterns. Flanagan’s photographs wrestle with this tension. While her picture appears pastoral at first glance, on closer inspection you can see a landscape littered with dead trees suffocated by the water; in Flanagan’s words, “the forest is literally floating away.”

salt water

by Tia-Simone Gardner

This visceral but elusive work exemplifies Tia-Simone Gardner’s use of layered processes to unsettle how we think about and know place. Although it withholds itself from being know completely, it contains a close-up photograph Gardner took of the surface of the Mississippi river in lower Louisiana, where levees built to facilitate navigation and oil and gas extraction have pushed saltwater from the Gulf inland. This saltwater intrusion has led to the destructions of coastal forests, especially cypress trees which store flooding water in the spring. Known then as Ghost Cypress, Gardner finds resonance in their haunting, in-between state—dead but not gone.

In exploring the in-between place where the fresh water of the Mississippi meets the saltwater of the Gulf, Gardner also points to the relationship between the river and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As a liquid highway, the Mississippi, and its broad watershed became crucial to sustaining and expanding slavery in the US.

Shipmate/Shipment I

by Tia-Simone Gardner

The imagery you see in Shipmate/Shipment I is the result of an experimental drawing process that blurs the lines between drawing, printmaking, and photography and their respective relationships to memory. By means of a series of steps that include burning, coating, etching, and sanding, Tia-Simone Gardner transferred layers of photographic images to a panel. No longer visible, the first image she applied to the surface was Salt Water (right). Layered on top of that, is an image of the wrecked Clotilda, the last known ship to smuggle enslaved people from Africa to the Mobile, Alabama, decades after US-involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade was illegal. Learn about Clotilda:

Roche, Emma Langdon. Historic Sketches of the South. United States, Knickerbocker Press, 1914.

Diouf, Sylviane A., and Sylviane A. Diouf Director, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Hurston, Zora Neale, et al. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”. United States, HarperCollins, 2018.

spirits live here

by Emily Donovan

Spirits Live Here is Emily Donovan’s homage and appeal to protect the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, located within the Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota. Part of the historic and contemporary homelands of the Ojibwe, the 1.1 million acres is one of the most protected wilderness areas in the country but is threatened by the encroachment of sulfide-ore copper mining. Using handmade natural dyes and minerals to reflect the area’s geologic shapes and colors, this painting also celebrates nature’s generosity while contemplating the delicacy of the intertwined relationship between humans and the environment.

the crown

by Kristin Maija Peterson

In this graphite and watercolor drawing, Kristin Maija Peterson captures a native prairie sunflower found in the Thomas Lake Native Prairie Preserve after a frost. Peterson is drawn to these plants because of the many ways they nurture society: “they protect and replenish soil, provide food for pollinators, stabilize shorelines, and perhaps most importantly, their deep root systems filter dirty water runoff from our infrastructure before it seeps into our waterways.”

Peterson’s art practice is shaped by her work with a number of environmental nonprofits, including Metro Blooms and Blue Thumb. Learn more about their important work at:

metroblooms.org (@metroblooms) and

bluethumb.org (@bluethumbmn)

the lone pine

by Jim Meyer

As a woodcut printmaker for over thirty years, Meyer often explores Minnesota north shore landscapes from intimate perspectives. Meyer seeks to reflect his materials in his compositions and finds the naturally bold quality of the woodcut print suitable for this purpose. He hand carves and individually inks each block, incorporating the natural woodgrain of his cuts into the finished pieces. The Lone Pine is a reduction print made using a single block of shina wood, alternating between carving and printing the block several times to create a multilayer print. It depicts Shovel Point, a site which overlooks Lake Superior, at Tettegouche State Park.

the mississippi

by Vernal Bogren Swift

Vernal Bogren Swift’s relationship with the Mississippi begins at a little creek that runs through her farm in Bovey, Minnesota, before joining the river a few miles beyond. But the story of the Mississippi she brings to life in this lively work stretches back into deep time, before the river was born. Ice, fossils, and limestone bedrock precede the arrival of ancient creatures, Sandhill Cranes and Paddlefish—the oldest surviving species in North America, which Bogren Swift ate growing up in the Missouri Ozarks. The artist drew from multiple influences to create her artwork, from the personal to the historical.

the wave

by Barbara Bend

In her sculpture The Wave, Barbara Bend weaves together zippers, neckties, t-shirt strips, curtain samples, silk necktie fabric, a sari, buttons, and shells in a kinetic gesture of force and embrace. By turning materials that she has on hand into a physical expression of constant movement, Bend meditates on the accelerated pace of change in the world today.

In her work, Bend draws from nature and the everyday—gathering plants for natural dyes, processing sheep’s wool for creating garments, saving fabric remnants for making quilts and rugs. Each time she gains deeper appreciation for her material and the techniques she uses to transform them.

tranquility

by Casey Bennett

In Tranquility, Casey Bennett experimented by combining wax with traditional oil paint. The wax adds a translucent surface to the panel, giving a soft, hazy quality to the landscape. In the artist’s words, the picture captures “the silvery light of overcast skies that makes spring days ethereal.” Bennett aims to evoke the calming experience of interacting with nature. She specifically excludes the litter and debris she encounters on her walks along the water, instead focusing the beauty of the marshlands.

Several artists in Many Waters face this question—how should we respond to the refuse in Minnesota’s waterways? In Float, the large sculpture to your right, for example, Presley Martin takes the opposite approach, collecting debris from the Mississippi River and turning it into an unexpected work of art about human impact on the natural world.

Untitled (Breaker)

by Megan Vossler

Through seemingly simple forms, Megan Vossler’s most recent body of work contemplates the contradictory power of water. It connects, transports, carries, submerges, and drowns. It cleans, dilutes, and erodes. Growing up on the California coast, her favorite time to visit the ocean was during a storm, when the water was at its most unsettled. She would watch the surface contort and erupt as she looked for glimpses of what was underneath.

In this meticulous drawing of a lone swell in the ocean, she only makes visible what rises to the surface. But it serves as a warning of the invisible forces that surround you in the ocean—from methodical tidal contractions to the most unpredictable, deadly undertow.  And as the seas warm and expand from climate change, their unpredictability increases.

vitality

by Annie Hejny

At once luminous and unrevealing, Vitality recreates the human experience of looking into a body of water and wondering about all that happens, unseen, beneath the surface. Fitting to its subject, this abstract painting involves more than meets the casual eye. Annie Hejny traveled the 120-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between St. Paul and Winona, Minnesota, respectfully collecting water and sediment along the way.

Blending water and sediment from several sites along the same river, and incorporating them into her acrylic paintings, allowed Hejny to contemplate the endurance of this water as it flows downstream. Reflecting on the experience, she said, “creating this painting, more than any other, was physically and emotionally challenging, acknowledging that our human vitality is directly connected to the vitality of the water. We need the water and the water needs us.”

We invited falling into our new pattern of the land

by Gregory Euclide

We invited falling into our new pattern of the land. An intriguing title, it is well suited to this diorama-esque work, which confuses visual perception. Is this a vista or an aerial view? A painting or a sculpture? Upon inspection, it becomes clear that it is both (vista and aerial, painting and sculpture), but these discoveries only lead to more questions. Is this one place or many? Is it real or imaginary? Are the objects within it natural or manufactured? Trash or treasures? Are their intended effects playful or serious? In making these interventions into the genre of landscape painting—with its romanticizing tendencies—Gregory Euclide seems to call into question the very premise of a “natural” landscape and invites us to fall into a new pattern of seeing the land.

out of round

by Presley Martin

found polystyrene and pins

fissures II (beneath the surface)

by Kelsey Bosch

In Fissures II (beneath the surface), Kelsey Bosch pairs recordings of ice from Jökulsárlón glacier in Iceland and a lake in southern Minnesota. The recordings include bubbling, thumping, even hissing sounds that repeat with subtle changes, gaining speed until they evoke, what Bosch calls, a “digital ice storm.” The artist has explained that this sound piece builds a connection between winters in Minnesota and the global threat of climate change. Listening to the combined sounds of melting ice building to a frenzy creates a visceral sense of urgency to address the climate crisis. As you listen, consider Ethan Jones’s large-scale photograph on the wall to your left, which also addresses the melting of polar ice.

Fissures II (beneath the surface) was commissioned by the Weisman Art Museum in 2018.

Listening to the mississippi

by Monica Moses Haller

There is no one correct way to listen to the river; there are multiple listenings and multiple rivers. Listening to the Mississippi is an iterative project that has unfolded since 2013. In asking listeners to orient themselves to the river through their sense of sound, rather than sight alone, the project seeks to understand the Mississippi as a dynamic condition.

The project activates underwater recordings gathered in 2015 by artists Monica Moses Haller and Sebastian Müllauer that span the river from the headwaters to the Gulf. To collect the sounds, they suspended a hydrophone (underwater mic) from an environmental robot called ORB, who navigates waterways and bayous and was designed by Müllauer and collaborators. On the river, ORB collected the sounds and animated their actions.

Here, recording and gathering sounds became a process of sharing with, and learning from, people along the river’s bank. In this iteration, composers Michi Wiancko and Judd Greenstein responded to these sounds, creating an audio landscape that takes the listener to the river, blending original composed music with the sounds gathered above. Listening to the Mississippi invites a perceptual adjustment to the river and attunement to critical histories, present and futures both human and non-human.

floating position (overview)

by Ben Moren

Ben Moren’s interdisciplinary work melds performance, film, and sculpture. In this film, a figure vigorously tries to stay afloat as it travels down a river in wintertime. Moren’s film engages with the frame of the monitor: as the figure moves from one to the next, it briefly vanishes from view before it reappears, creating a momentary worry that perhaps it has been pulled beneath the water’s surface by the current. The swimming figure is a tiny white dot in a broad field of dark water and recalls how incredibly small we are compared to the vast expanse of the landscape. In this work, Moren asks us to consider how people as stewards of the natural world can and should exist within it.

lake superior Strong

by Joan Bemel Iron Moccasin

archival pigment print

*not located at NewStudio Gallery