TT Journal, ISSUE 7, September 2024

by Rosalyn Driscoll

Twenty artists set out to explore together the nature of water and rivers. They ended up also reflecting on the perennial metaphor of time as river. The artists are members of Think About Water, a collective of artists and activists who interpret, celebrate and protect water. They wanted to make something together but also to honor each artist’s distinctive vision. They chose the format of a game played by the Surrealists called exquisite corpse: one artist drew a head, then folded the paper so their drawing could not be seen, and handed it to another artist; that artist drew the next part of the body, folded the paper, and so on through several artists and foldings. The paper was then unfolded and the whole, surreal figure appeared.

In that spirit, the Think About Water artists created an exquisite corpse—not a human body, but the body of a river. Each artist made a section of river in their own studio in their own medium, style, vision and time, without seeing each other’s work. The artworks were then hung together in an art gallery. The assembled sequence of images snaked across the walls, suggesting a river of multiple forms and meanings.

The Exquisite River project also reveals several aspects of time. Each artist’s process of image-making took time. Each artist drew from their individual and cultural histories to create a unique image and tell a personal story. The artworks embody the depths of time and experience each artist has woven into them. In many of these artworks, time is integral to their reference to the disruptions and degradation humans have wrought on the Earth. We are now experiencing different kinds of time in our collective awareness. Gradual changes over the centuries are now accelerating very fast. Changes are visible within our lifetimes and even within seasons. Time in the urgent need to slow climate change as quickly as possible. Time in the projections by scientists of climate effects into the near and far future. Time in the time it takes to regenerate a natural domain devastated by human abuse.  We are being forced to grasp different kinds of time, accustomed as we have been to seeing, thinking and behaving in short-term ways, oblivious to the longer-term impacts of our actions. We are living in a time that makes us simultaneously aware of geological time, evolutionary time, biological time, oceanic time, the timing of seasons, the timing of a monsoon, and the impacts of humans in our time on Earth. Using the metaphor of exquisite corpse calls into question the finite life and even the mortality of our beloved rivers. Will we help them regenerate and renew or will they diminish and die, as some already have?

The first exhibition of Exquisite River took place at Ely Center for Contemporary Art in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, April 14 – June 2, 2024. The project is available to travel to other venues.In the gallery, the artworks were hung separately to create a flow. In the digital version they were linked into one long river. The following selection from among the twenty artworks provides different visions of rivers and of time.

Rosalyn Driscoll, Cinefoil, 2023, aluminum foil, 25 x 34 x 2 inches

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