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WATERSHED MOMENTS The 2015 Overlook Field School focused on water and watersheds, seeking to understand the natural structure of watersheds, our cultural demands on those systems, and the tensions and unintended consequences that occur when we insert ourselves into the waterscape. Site visits kayaking the Susquehanna River, touring the reservoir, dam and turbine hall of a hydroelectric facility, and exploring the orange, smothered waterscape of acid mine drainage revealed the context of water conflicts in northeastern Pennsylvania. Students explored those tensions and conflicts through a four-week design studio. The course explored water through three specific lenses: matrix, material, and myth. This inquiry ended with the creation of 5 student-designed, site-specific art installations meant to evoke a deeper understanding of how water shapes both the physical and the cultural landscape. Matrix: Exploration of water and watersheds as large physical and cultural systems in which design work is situated, and that design work potentially impacts. This exploration included contemporary concerns and contexts that are changing the nature of water in our society – the effects of changing climate, of pollution, of urbanization. Material: Reflections and ripples, pools, jets and cascades – the qualities of water in designed landscapes and artworks changes dramatically with changes in form, and those forms are deeply influenced by the nature of water itself, its sources and its courses. Myth: Water is one of the most expressive design materials, connecting to birth and death, knowledge and obfuscation, mutability and strength. Using readings and artworks as text, students explored the evocative qualities of water in contemporary art.
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WATER RITE Shelby Meyers + Kyle Pollack + Colin Poranski Water is essential to life and central to culture. The material properties of water – reflection and lucidity, ripple and burble – underpin its cultural associations with knowledge and understanding, cleansing and renewal. Yet water also concentrates; as it flows over and through surfaces, contaminates are released, flowing with the water, concentrating in reservoirs. The bells, mirrors and white ribbons of Water Rite highlights the material properties of water, and form the infrastructure for a mimetic ritual where participants engage in the fouling of a reservoir through the cleansing of objects. As the water in the bowl is slowly soiled, participants ponder their own role within the watershed and cycle, reflected back to the sky above the farm field.
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WHITE Bryn Davis + Audrey Charman Northeastern Pennsylvania thrived from the extraction of anthracite coal, and when the mining industry collapsed, so too did the economy and the cultural and domestic institutions of many towns. Seemingly solid cultural assumptions – livelihood, home, health – were revealed as fragile and endangered. White critiques our assumptions of endless natural resources, and the risks to culture when those in power value the status quo over proactive environmental agendas. Pure, white furnishings of home hang suspended from the tree canopy, held fast by solid blocks of ice. As the day warms, and the ice melts, the trappings of civilization slowly fall. The natural resource depleted, the furniture sits askew in a dry creek bed.
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SLICE Keegan Oneal + Kelsey Wai We take for granted the ground beneath our feet. We trust that it is solid, that it is pure, that it supports life structurally and ecologically. Yet in northeast Pennsylvania, the ripples of coal have been extracted from between layers of sandstone, and now deep underground, pipes reach out for miles, drawing natural gas from fracked shale layers. When the coalmines closed, miners often “robbed the pillars�, dangerously removing coal from the solid support piers that held up as many as twelve layered veins of coal. Beneath your feet, there may be a fragile honeycomb of anthracite coal and sandstone, poised to collapse. Slice takes you beneath the surface of the earth, soil and leaf duff precipitously poised above you, to ponder the human costs of resource extraction.
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CATCHMENT Rodney Bohner Catchment renders visible the lost potential of rainfall on the farm. Each year, nearly 50,000 gallons of water falls on the Overlook barn roof, is captured in gutters and directed to downspouts, and is released to flow across the land. In Catchment, the viewer enters this annual volume of water, rendered in rippling milky plastic sheets. Simple materials evoke the phenomena of water, submersing viewers in the watery light and rippling sound. Immersed in the scale of lost water, the visitor is asked to imagine what might happen if the rainwater were diverted, stored, and used.
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LAKE LENS Yue Fan Water is central to life, and often we believe that we fully understand the water cycle, the nature of water, and the role of water in our ecosystem. But Lake Lens challenges our perception and preconceptions. Two rings, seemingly identical in material and size, reveal themselves on closer inspection to be quite different. The journey by boat across the lake rewards the viewer with deeper understanding and knowledge of the relationship between the two forms, a metaphor for the process of acquiring deep knowledge about an ecosystem.
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Fuller Center for Productive Landscapes Department of Landscape Architecture University of Oregon http://landarch.uoregon.edu/ 2015
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