ART INSPIRED BY WATER
UConn’s Avery Point exhibition explores Earth’s most precious resource
Aside from a good excuse to visit Avery Point’s gorgeous Branford House, UConn’s current art exhibition, “Unfiltered,” offers a meditation on the current state of Earth’s most precious and often overlooked resource: water. Specifically, “Unfiltered” seeks to explore the subtle power of water — its ability to change landscapes, inspire awe, and essentially dictate life as we know it.
As a campus-wide collaboration, UConn’s Benton Museum of Art worked with the school’s Natural Resources, Engineering and Marine Sciences departments, among others, as well as programs such as the CT Sea Grant, to
organize and select works for the exhibit. The show was then used to supplement discussions within water-related courses at the university. The art displayed at Avery Point's campus presents a scaleddown version of the original exhibition that took place at the museum last fall. Both shows were curated by Benton director Nancy Stula.
The first room of the exhibit contains a handful of impressionistic paintings from around the New England region — primarily paintings inspired by the Connecticut River, offering a sort of reverence to the marvel of sea and riverside landscapes before leading into the exhibit's more serious contemplations.
In the second gallery, photographs by Ravi Agarwal of village life on a river in India demonstrate how the livelihood of a community is centered around this body of water. If water level were to rise or be further polluted, how would the community fare? Colorful mixed media collages by Susan Hoffman Fishman contemplate the wars that are sure to be fought over water in the future. Though the exhibition is quite small (14 pieces total), there is much to consider with each work.
A film by Vibha Galhotra, which rounds out the show, is perhaps one of the more poignant pieces on display — a somber yet compelling demonstration of the pollution flowing through the Yamuna River in India. Volunteers dressed in rubber suits walk into the river with a white sheet, smothering the sheet in river water before carrying it the banks to squeeze and string out. As a result, ripples of thick muck run over the sheet's surface, splattering to the ground — ultimately leaving the viewer to question humanity's impact over this Earth.