Artscape

Go with the flow

By Tracy Zollinger Turner

"Olentangy River Riffles South of Bethel Road" by George C. Anderson

The lush foliage, reflective blue ripples of water and rutted bark in George C. Anderson's river pictures have a beckoning, dreamlike quality. Generally a purveyor of commercial work, the photographer seems to be advertising the allure of some placid vacation spot, far from the city, with the images he shot while spending his free time canoeing and fishing. But most of his works, included in the Ways of Knowing Water exhibit on view through August at OSU Urban Arts Space, were taken along the Olentangy River, inside of I-270.

Anderson's work is among the most undisguised love letters to our city's rivers in a show that celebrates water in a variety of ways.

According to Rick Livingston, associate director of OSU's Humanities Institute, who co-curated the show with Prudence Gill, the show is the culmination of a year's worth of conversations about the best way the new Downtown space could engage the city, several of OSU's vast resources and, most importantly, the physical, urban environment.

"We've learned how important the element of water is to animating people's memories and sense of place, and this is a way to awaken people to what we have here," said Livingston. "Columbus is often described negatively, as though we don't have a lot of natural beauty surrounding us, but we do have a lot."

Every nook and cranny of the space contains a meditation on some aspect of water, including winding literary quotations painted on the cement floor and posters on support beams that bulletin information about our ecosystem, like the fact that only one percent of the fresh water on Earth exists at surface level, while nearly 70 percent is frozen in the planet's ice caps and glaciers and some is always in the clouds.

Like Anderson's photographs, a number of the exhibited pieces explore local surroundings, personally and directly. A video installation by Elizabeth Gerdeman greets gallery-goers at the entrance, for which she filmed the eight miles between Highbanks and Whetstone parks from the front of a canoe (guided by Anderson). Painter Alan Crockett captures the moody, gray-green murkiness of the water itself in oil-on-linen pieces like "Scioto" and "Along the Olentangy, Antrim Lake."

Others, such as the interactive "Resonance" by Adon Newman, or Sky Shineman's "Stone Pass," explore the more circumspect, alchemical qualities of water. There are also more concrete scientific, educational and historic aspects to the exhibition, including an archival photograph of the building of the O'Shaughnessy Dam, a collection of maps from OSU's geology library, maps of Franklin County's existing groundwater resources and watersheds, and specimens of life from the rivers provided by OSU's Biodiversity Museum.

The explorations of water by ecologists and activists are every bit as striking and moving as the professional artwork that is included in the show.

"They are part of this wave of people thinking about the cultural meaning of the rivers, becoming attuned to this environment, so we're doing our best to contribute to that," said Livingston.

Last fall, Friends of the Lower Olentangy Watershed conducted a writing workshop that yielded a striking poem, "Once Forgotten Rivers," written by V.J. Mazeika, who works for the Environmental Protection Agency. Its multiple stanzas include this one:

"I once: Stood angular and white stirring under the sun/ to weep and shelve boulders/ for the next age's sorting. Rolling to scratch a bedrock itch/ And reveal a mastodon enamel/ Shining in the moonlight."

In conjunction with Ways of Knowing Water, public programs are also scheduled throughout the run of the show, including film screenings, gallery talks with contributing artists and a discussion of the global demand for drinking water. A complete list is available on the space's website.

July 24, 2008

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