EVAPORATION

The interdiscplinary group of artists spearheading the Harmattan Theater company's investigation into the relationship between New York City's rivers and estuaries and its land mass are intrinsically preoccupied with the present ecology of New York City and its historic pasts embedded in the landfills, macadam, slants and slopes of the city.  Evaporation is a key concept we have been working with in relating the impact of the Hudson River water to its rocky surroundings.  In the Soho project of Living Lines, we started with the topography of the area presented by the Viele Map of the 1800's.  The question of how to relate the historicity of the area to its current usage influenced our choice of materials, visual metaphors and aesthetic categories of scaling.  SoHo's industrial past and italian american cultural roots accentuated the visual signals of the final shape the Living Lines installation took, of factory lines, clotheslines, exposed materiality, layered perceptions of how things are seen.  Here the idea of evaporation became a visual cue layered through the mylar and acetate drawings, so the images of human movement achieved a certain translucency, a spectral quality of multiple realities unfolding, the past and the present, through the lens of embodied time.

The Henry Hudson Project on Governors Island in June 2009 worked expressly with evaporation as a physical principle of marking, reclamation, healing, contamination, forgetting, and trace.  The site chosen was at a forceful point of water contact- waves spraying onto the pavement at high tide and exposing a splendid stretch of beach at low tide.  This stretch of beach became a focal point of our show as we used the Hudson River water as a key element of imprinting images on the landscape.  The residual outlines of human movement, flowers, feet, leaves, milk and sugar, left by the Hudson River's overflow, raised tactile questions about the relationship of human activity to waterfronts, the cleanliness of the river's water for human consumption, and its continuing abundance and generosity as an energey resource.  Evaporation in this performance became a mnemonic marker as well as a visual metaphor for the future of thinking about human demands on water resources.  And the river's power to impact our life.