''River Ghostings: A Floodplain Abstract'' involves a large installation which re-imagines the Rio Grande’s historical floodplain within a to-scale recreation of the current linear corridor of the river. The Rio Grande was once, before human intervention, a meandering, perennially flowing wide river with a shifting substrate, and the floodplain once extended from 9-mile hill west of the river all the way east to where the University of New Mexico exists today. The river freely migrated, limited only by bedrock outcroppings and valley terraces. Over the course of Albuquerque’s development as a major city, the Rio Grande has been reshaped and redirected for irrigation purposes and flood control, resulting in the sharply controlled, narrow channel it has become today. The consequences of reducing the river’s size and breadth over time have begun to become apparent, through the destruction and destabilization of riparian habitat that depends on temporal flooding and meandering offshoots of the river, as well as water abundance depletion.
The viewer walks through the sculptural corridor, as if she were walking upstream in the river, experiencing the contrast between the neat, narrow formation and the organic, undulating surfaces of the panels, much like the disconnect between the constrained form of the river today and the potentially wild and ephemeral form it once took.
This installation visualizes a local result of a global phenomena that is an ever-pressing issue in our current society- how have we as human beings actually changed the ecology of our planet?
The images here are from the piece's showing at Third Street Arts in New Mexico.
This installation will be on exhibit as a larger, to-scale piece replicating 20 miles of the Rio Grande in late 2009 at the University Art Museum at the University of New Mexico.
