'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 historical research, Stull Meyers said, and ultimately aims to tell a variety of rich stories about watersheds. Those ideas resonated with the artists who eventually agreed to come aboard the project. That includes Garrick Imatani, a visual artist who produced a series of new photographs for the exhibit.
The photos explore the history of the famous Willamette Meteorite. It's known as Tomanowos to members of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, and was carried by the Missoula floods to what is now West Linn, thousands of years ago. It's a sacred object to tribal members, but in 1902, it was secretly hauled away from its resting site, before eventually being sold to the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Imatani's ever-shifting lenticular photographs show black-and-white historical images of the meteorite being exhibited — from one angle. From another, the photos reveal modern views of a white three-dimensional replica of Tomanowos, including one in which the replica is carried by a canoe across a river. In a more secluded corner of the exhibit, a video produced by artist Jefferson Pinder will be projected onto the walls.
It's an eight-minute recording of a performance piece Pinder created showing a mixed-race group of people floating on inner tubes on Lake Michigan on July 27, 2019. That date marks 100 years after a white beachgoer killed 17-year-old Black teenager Eugene Williams for drifting over to what was at the time the white section of a Chicago beach. Viewers themselves can float along with the video's participants — in some fashion — if they choose to sit on one of the available large bean-bag-like cushions on the exhibit floor.
For Bosworth, Pinder's piece captures a peaceful and beautiful moment on the water, and was an essential component of the exhibit. "We just wanted to make sure that part of the exhibition was this understanding that there are very real cultural, social and political power differences in how people experience water," she said. One of the other key takeaways both curators hope to leave with viewers is how artists possess many of the same questions about the world as scientists, historians and educators.
"It's just that the ways that they (tell stories) and address those questions take a different form," Stull Meyers said. For example, a piece by artist Saif Azzuz employs his family's 100-foot fishing net to underscore the environmental changes happening on the Klamath River. That net has caught fewer and fewer salmon and more and more algae over the years.
Both curators will host a talk about the exhibit at 6 p.m. Friday, Sept.
27, in PRAx's Toomey Lobby, before the premiere of "Rising," a concert bringing together scientists and musicians that explores rising temperatures and sea levels. That performance will be in PRAx's Detrick Hall, and tickets can be purchased online. "How to Carry Water" will run from Sept.
21 to Dec. 21. Entry is free.
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