About the Project
This project is made possible with funds from the New York State Legislature and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
We gratefully acknowledge New York State Arts Mid-Hudson for awarding We Were Water Once / 2225 an Arts & Culture 2024 grant. The work is one of five works-in-progress immersive art-video pavilions, each piece posing a distinct artistic-societal question.
WWWO / 2225 asks "What will we remember?" as it explores connections between water and memory in a time of rapid and unpredictable climate change.
Share Your Water Memory
This work is a public collaboration. Brief, intimate, personal memories of water shared by you and others are continuously woven into the the digital and physical installations. Please add your own memory of water!
A memory of water from your childhood. Or a recent impression. An encounter with the sea. A memory of snow, rainfall, clouds. A dripping faucet. A scary storm. Any moment that sticks with you. We all have them.
Click "Your Water Memory" to create your own 15-to-60 second selfie-video Water Memory and share it as part of the piece. Full instructions are on the linked page.
WWWO / 2225 will blend your memory into the artwork -- the work thus changing with each new memory added -- and, like water, morphing continuously.
Or, Simply Follow ...
Or, just click Follow to gently note the project's progress through an occasional email update. (We promise not to blast your email box!)
"Who are we?"
The pavilion series trespasses conventions to ask how - and more importantly why - we represent ourselves.
Collectively.
Individually.
Once a privileged medium, video (and by extension film) is ubiquitous.
We're all storytellers now.
So the central question for today's artist becomes:
How do we make our stories real again?
Circus Exotica
"Who do you follow?" An immersive, physical-digital art pavilion that explores spectacle and myth in an age of celebrity.
We Were Water Once / 2225
"What will we remember?" An immersive physical-digital art pavilion that explores water and memory in an age of climate challenge.
Black on White
'...Other than you?" An immersive physical-digital art pavilion that explores race and gender in an age of otherism.
Strange Parthenon
"Where do we go?" An immersivie physical-digital art pavilion that explores futurism and magical thinking in an age of technocracy.
Creed (Need) / Greed (Seed)
"What do you want?" An immersive physical-digtal art pavilion that explores belief and desire in an age of disparity.
Artist
I am an echo. Memories remembered, unremembered. I create enigmatic visual stories: installations and texts that interlace physical and digital elements to imaginatively question the nature of identity and reality seen through the lens of the human heart.
From the beginning, I've led two lives, art-maker and engineer, dream inquisitor and precision builder. This tension at the center of my art drives what and how I explore.
I often start with imagery - video, photo and text sequences - reworking, abstracting and transforming them 3-dimensionally until they take on psychological and thematic qualities that resonate. More recently I've explored manifesting this new imagery within large-scale physical pavilion architectures constructed of gossamer-like tissue paper and Kevlar line, overlaying the structures with transmuted video, text and, at times, "memories" recorded by the public. I re-create the experience in 3D-Web hyperspace as well, suspending the piece in both the physical and immaterial worlds.
