Water covers roughly 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, and makes up more than 60 percent of the human body. We are water, and water connects us all. To engage with this exhibition, it is important to start with this understanding . Water is a source of life, it is sacred, and it is a tool. Water teaches us, and we can learn from it. Water is a kind of school.
Conceived in this way, Oscar Tuazon: Water School will unfold over the course of several months, and radiates in many directions, touching on art, architecture, spatial design, systems thinking, and environmental sustainability. Its anchor is a section of Tuazon’s large-scale, architecture-as-sculpture Zome Alloy (2016), which houses reading materials sourced from the MSU Libraries. For, as the artist notes, “A school starts with a library.”
Other works on view point to the artist’s ongoing investigations into the conceptual and material dimensions of water politics and sustainable building practices, and tie together the Water School in Michigan with the artist’s schools in California and Minnesota. These schools are spaces connecting local concerns with national and international conversations.
Situated within a highly regarded research university, the exhibition also features archival and documentary materials, tracing sources that inform the artist’s work and topics covered in the exhibition. This includes research into the countercultural and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s, highlighting the work of key figures and important publications. These histories continue to influence the present — a critical moment when new ideas and approaches to environmental issues are very much needed.
This is really interesting!
I loved the books within the Water School