'The dam rubble will be here at 11," Ashley Stull Meyers told her fellow art curator last week at the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts — better known as PRAx. It was a drizzly morning, so wet shoes squeaked inside the relatively bare white walls of PRAx's Stirek Gallery. Meyers and her collaborator were in the middle of planning how to dress those walls with artwork, including that soon-arriving debris.
By "dam rubble," Meyers, the Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning Chief Curator of Art, Science and Technology, was referring to material an artist had procured for a sculpture installation evoking the recent dam removals on the Klamath River. That piece will join a collection of work to be showcased later this month for an exhibition titled "How to Carry Water" that launches PRAx's yearlong thematic dive into water. The exhibit, set to open for the public Saturday, Sept.
21, will include a collection of current and newly commissioned art, compelling viewers to see and consider watersheds through a range of unexpected and critical lenses — and they're not all ecological. The pieces tell stories about history and culture too. The water-themed project is the product of a two-year-long collaboration, and a creative crossing of disciplines, between Stull Meyers and her fellow Mary Jones and Thomas Hart Horning curator Kelly Bosworth, an assistant professor of public history and ethnomusicology at Oregon State University.
The exhibition grew out of Bosworth's hi.