Raoul Deal, Lisa Moline, Lane Hall, and I spent the last weekend in Kitchener, Ontario completing a drawing installation for the Surface Tension: The Future of Water exhibition that opens this Friday, September 20 at THE MUSEUM.
Surface Tension is now on its third location after debuting at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland and than traveling to EyeBeam in NYC.
This time around our work – Basin – was more overtly political and had the activist kick that we were looking for. We focused on the Great Lakes and the environmental issues that impacted the eight US states and the Canadian provinces that border the lakes. Our research focused on the ecological harm that is being done by the escalation of oil and gas extraction in the region (hydraulic fracturing, the expansion of pipelines carrying tarsands crude, etc.) The drawing itself was layered. The background had words, images, and phrases that talked about water privatization, the politics of water, invasive species, etc. The foreground had a map of the Great Lakes in the middle. To the left were circles that highlighted the environmental issues facing the water, land, and air in the Great Lakes region, and to the right were circles that highlighted recent environmental victories.
Here is a video that documents Surface Tension when it opened in Dublin:
More images from our recent install in Kitchener:
And a great demo flyer that we saw on the streets outside The Museum:
