water
ThirstLab Workshop #2: Ripple Effects: The Politics of Fresh Water Flows
Sunday, March 30, 3-5pm
$5 admission
With:
Alex Prud’homme (Author of Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the 21st Century), Peter Walsh (visual/public artist), Michael Cirino (culinary artist and founder of A Razor, A Shiny Knife) and soprano Carter Scott with pianist Leesa Dahl.
“Every time we use water – even for something as mundane as washing our hands, spraying the lawn, or generating power for light – it sets off deep and wide hydrologic ripple effects, with consequences that most of us are unaware of. Now we no longer have the luxury of ignorance.” – Alex Prud’homme
In New York City, we take our access to fresh water for granted, and rarely think twice about its source or what forces shaped its presence in our kitchen sink. And yet the history and current reality of our so-called “local” water is a complex, layered tale, linking the city to specific regions and communities in upstate New York through the famous (and infamous!) Croton Aqueduct. [continue reading…]
THIRST: Opening Reception and Workshop #1
Saturday, March 22
Workshop, 3-6pm; Reception, 6-9pm
Join us for the Workshop, the Beer Brewing demonstration and the Opening Reception of THIRST, the third investigatory adventure of our yearlong exploration of WATER. THIRST is a participatory curatorial project exploring thirsty materials, plants, animals and people. In order to reveal the complex forces shaping our physical need and psychological desire for water, Proteus Gowanus will be transformed into a monthlong living research laboratory. [more]
Hydrogen Bonding: A Workshop in Dyeing, Felting and Water-Molecule-Making, 3-6pm, Saturday’s workshop is the first of a series of Thirstlab Workshops. This workshop’s leaders are Hope Ginsburg (artist/ educator Virginia Commonwealth University) and Laura Sansone (owner, House-Wear Design Studio/educator, Parsons The New School for Design).
DIY Homebrewing, 6pm, Chris Lovrich from Brooklyn Homebrew will demonstrate how to brew a batch of beer from one of their favorite DIY kits! So if you’re interested in learning how to use water to cook up a different kind of plant-steeped concoction, be sure to catch him in action during our Thirst Opening.
Convergence of Art & Marine Science with Jesse Ausubel
Friday, March 21, 7pm
Admission: $5
In this illustrated talk, Jesse H. Ausubel will discuss his massive recently completed project, the world’s first Census of Marine Life, a cooperative international effort to assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of marine life across the planet. [continue reading…]
Textiles and Water: A Love/Hate Affair
Sunday, March 9, 4pm
$5 suggested donation
As part of our yearlong exploration of WATER, we are happy to host this unique presentation by a textile expert (and longtime Proteus collaborator) on the relationship between water and textiles.
In this illustrated talk, Janice Everett will discuss the relationship of textile manufacture and design to the environment, [continue reading…]
Two New Zone A Workshops: Drawing & Watercolor
Series begin March 1 and March 2 respectively, 10am
Proteus Gowanus is hosting two new Zone A Workshop series taught by two experienced artists and teachers. In honor of our yearlong theme, both workshops focus on painting and drawing WATER. Read on for more information… [continue reading…]
Exploring Nowhere: Mirages, Digital Maps, and the Historical Problem of Location
Sunday, February 23, 4pm
Admission Fee: $5
Location Services are ON! In this time of hyper-locatability via digital maps, what kinds of places and things might still remain lost? Marget Long and Carolyn Dinshaw look to the optical phenomenon of the mirage—a strange and elusive “nowhere” often perceived as water—to explore the broad concepts of location and locatability. The talk investigates the mirage’s visual and cultural history through a wide array of materials: medieval maps and legends of Paradise, early 20th-century Arctic exploration, and photographs and video works from Long’s project on mirages. Long and Dinshaw take a long view of the mirage– an illusion that prompts an irrational experience of time and space–in order finally to imagine how to work and play with current digital mapping technologies intended to work us. [continue reading…]
Reanimation Library/Gowanus Branch Reception
Saturday, January 11, 6 – 10 pm
Our project-in-residence Reanimation Library presents the second exhibition of our yearlong investigation of Water. The exhibition, Reanimation Library/Gowanus Branch, presents new work by Jen Bervin, David East, and Marget Long. The exhibition will also include a selection of water-related books from the library’s collection. The exhibition works in sculpture, photography, video, installation and textile all grew out of an initial encounter with printed material, often from the library’s own collection. The exhibition runs from January 4 through March 16, 2014. [continue reading…]
Mapping Mindsets: Containment and Outbreak
An evening with Rebecca Solnit, Rebecca Snedeker & Lydia Pelot-Hobbs,
authors of Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas
Sunday, October 27, 5pm
$5 admission
Due to popular demand, we will move en masse across the Union St Bridge to Show Room Gowanus to accommodate the demand for this event. Come early to see the exhibition, then walk the 1/2 block with us at 5pm for the event.
As part of our yearlong exploration of Water and our current exhibition, Containment, we are pleased to host Rebecca Solnit and co-authors for a discussion of New Orleans history, told as a history of containment and outbreak—of water, of disease, of power, of poison, of truth, of populations.
Rebecca Snedeker and Rebecca Solnit’s Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas describes, with the help of dozens of contributors including cartographers, writers, artists, and scholars, this remarkable place of convergence and divergence in 22 maps and essays.
Subjects include [continue reading…]
Living Water Culture in the Eastern Himalayas
Thursday, October 3, 7:30pm
Betsy Damon, Proteus Gowanus exhibiting artist, will discuss her research, documentation and experience of Tibetan water culture and its sacred water sites in the Eastern Himalayan Mountain Range. This culture has thrived for the last 1500 years, maintaining pristine water sources. Like many indigenous peoples, their culture is threatened by urban expansion and natural resource extraction. Betsy will discuss the origins of the Tibetan water culture, her own stories working with Tibetans and the relevance of the Tibetan understanding of water to contemporary water issues. [continue reading…]
Flood/Stage: Performing Transhumance on the Zambezi
Performing Transhumance on the Zambezi
Sunday, September 22, 5pm
Admission: $5
This illustrated anthropological lecture by anthropologist Thomas Miller focuses on the role of water in a particular history through the lenses of ritual, politics, symbolism and music.
In western Zambia, the Lozi of the Barotse floodplain practice “transhumance,” a distinct migratory way of life. During the rainy season, when the Zambezi River inundates their homes and leaves their fields underwater, the people migrate to seasonal quarters in the hill country. Every year the royal barge of the paramount chief, who according to Lozi tradition has divine spiritual and moral authority over nature, leads the people to higher ground in a ceremony called Kuomboka (“Getting out of the water”). [continue reading…]
