I AM WATER is a public art exhibition organized by Our Humanity Matters and ecoartspace in collaboration with SaveArtSpace. The exhibition consists of a series of billboards sited in New York City that will address our relationship to water and our human understanding that we are water.

Water is the origin of life with the innate purpose to continue creation. In water, we see that everything is connected and interrelated. Everything is liquid before it becomes solid. Humans, who are mostly water, depend on it to protect our DNA and for our basic survival. Water is not a resource but an essential connection to life. The one-sidedness of modern consciousness and our disconnect from nature increasingly subjects water to pollution. If we do not change our behavior, we will run out of water.

We humans cannot be healthy if our waters are not healthy. This exhibition is an opportunity to show water’s mystery and importance and to help reestablish, on a deep cellular level, the intimate relationship with water that we have lost in modern life. 

The I AM WATER selected artists are Basia Irland and Derek Irland, Ellen Jantzen, Ellen Kozak, Helen Glazer, Hillary Johnson, Holly Fay, Joan Perlman, Lisette Morales, Maria Whiteman, Margaret LeJeune and Hanien Conradie, and Danielle Siegelbaum.

Exhibition Curator: Patricia Watts, founder of ecoartspace.

Production Curator: Tanja Andrejasic Wechsler, founder of Our Humanity Matters.

During the week of June 21, 2021, SaveArtSpace will launch public art installations for each selected work on billboard ad spaces in New York City. The public art will be on view for at least one month.

Participating Organizations:

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.

Our Humanity Matters is a 501c3 organization that facilitates a more enlightened and sustainable humanity by examining the spiritual and ecological challenges related to mass media, as a medium that mirrors today’s culture, and its relationship to water. Our Humanity Matters is strategically supported by I AM WATER DROP, a reusable water bottle designed to change the way we relate to water and the rest of Nature. 

Founded in 1999 by Patricia Watts, ecoartspace served as a bi-coastal nonprofit platform for artists addressing environmental issues in the U.S. for twenty years. In 2020, ecoartspace transformed into an international membership-based community of artists, scientists, advocates, students, professionals, galleries and institutions who are concerned about the health of Planet Earth. Working together, supporting one another and sharing resources, we are better prepared to envision a livable future. 

Curators

Tanja Andrejasic Wechsler, founder of Our Humanity Matters and designer of I AM WATER DROP, is dedicated to inspiring more enlightened and sustainable humanity with the knowledge that everything is interconnected. She creates products along with traditional media that reflect our highest aspirations and integral solutions. Wechsler believes that current marketing strategies and product choices are perpetuating the misuse and damage of water. Knowing that a new mindset is required to repair those damages, she uses the power of the marketplace to bring awareness and appreciation for water, to counteract misinformation, and to reduce the abuse of the fragile, natural equilibrium on which we depend. Wechsler grew up in Slovenia, a country known for its pristine waters and the first in the European Union to amend Water Rights to its constitution and denounce water privatization. She completed Mechanical Engineering School and has a degree in Philosophy from the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. More recently she received an MA in Media from The New School where her mentor Paul Ryan deepened her understanding of Ecology and its relationship to mind and media. Wechsler is a member of the UN Global Compact.

Connect with Tanja on Instagram at @tanjawechslerohm.

Patricia Watts, the founder of ecoartspace, has curated over thirty art and ecology exhibitions including Performative Ecologies (2020), Contemplating OTHER (2018),  Enchantment (2016),  FiberSHED (2015), Shifting Baselines (2013), MAKE:CRAFT (2010), and Hybrid Fields (2006). She has curated three water shows including Works on Water and Delta Waters (2012), and WaterWorks (2006). Since 2008, Watts has conducted video interviews with thirty pioneering ecological artists for the ecoartspace archive and has written Action Guides of replicable social practice projects including Eve Mosher's HighWaterLine. She has a visionary entrepreneurial approach to curating that supports transdisciplinary and transformative collaborative environments. In Fall 2020, for the annual ecoartspace exhibition titled ecoconsciousness, she strategically placed three billboards with ecological messages in the Missouri Ozarks, where some of the most conservative counties in the U.S. are located. Watts is currently based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Connect with Patricia on Instagram at @ecoartspace.

Selected Artists

Location: Grand St & Catherine St, Brooklyn, NY

Fulbright Scholar, Basia Irland, is an author, sculptor, installation artist, and activist who creates international water projects featured in her books, “Water Library” (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) and “Reading the River: The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland” (Museum De Domijnen, 2017). These books focus on projects the artist has created over four decades in Africa, Canada, Europe, South America, Southeast Asia, and the United States. Through her work, Irland offers a creative understanding of water while examining how communities of all beings rely on this vital element. She is Professor Emerita, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, where she established the Arts and Ecology Program. Her art is featured in over 70 international publications. Check out her exuberant website, basiairland.com, where you will find blogs about global waterways written for National Geographic; images from her large retrospective in the Netherlands; and extensive projects around the world including: Waterborne Disease Scrolls; “The Gathering of Waters,” which connects communities along the entire length of rivers; and “Receding/Reseeding,” hand-carved ephemeral Ice Books embedded with seed texts that are floated down streams with the help of local communities to aid riparian restoration, and educate about melting glaciers and climate disruption. Irland was recently selected to represent the United States in the Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador.

Information about image: Every year hundreds of sadhus (holy person or religious ascetic) and pilgrims begin the arduous Narmadaparikrama, a circumambulation of the entire length of the Narmada River, India. Dressed in white and carrying their earthly possessions, devotees perform the meritorious act of walking from the Arabian Sea at Bharuch, along one side of the river, all the way to the source at Amarkantak in Madhya Pradesh, and then return to the sea along the opposite bank, keeping the waters to their right. It is a two-to-three-year journey of over 1,600 miles (2600 km). At each small creek or tributary, the pilgrims scoop water into their cups, take a drink, and call out, “Bless Mother Narmada!” Every day prayers are offered to the river’s flow, and small oil lamps are floated upon her spine. Along the route, pilgrims are given water, food, and places to rest. I was so honored to witness some of these pilgrims when I was researching the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada River with a reporter from the Times of India.

Connect with Basia on Facebook: basia.irland or on Instagram at @basiairland.

Location: Metropolitan Ave & Woodward Ave, Queens, NY

Ellen Jantzen was born and raised in St. Louis Missouri. Her early college years were spent obtaining a degree in graphic arts; later emphasizing fine art. Ellen spent two years at FIDM (the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising) in downtown Los Angeles. Here, she obtained her advanced degree in 1992.

After a few years working in the industry, including several years at Mattel Toy Company as a senior project designer, she became disillusioned with the corporate world and longed for a more creative outlet. Having been trained in computer design while at Mattel, Ellen continued her training on her own using mostly Photoshop software.

Ellen doesn’t consider herself a “photographer” but an image-maker, as she creates work that bridges the world of photography, prints and collage. As digital cameras began producing excellent resolution, she found her perfect medium. It was a true confluence of technical advancements and creative desire that culminated in her current explorations in photo-inspired art using both a camera to capture imagery and a computer to alter, combine and manipulate the pieces. Her work is best described as “photomontages”

Ellen’s work is shown and published internationally.

The National Museum Of Women In The Arts, New Mexico State Committee chose Ellen as their “Artist Spotlight” for the month of February 2020

First Place Winner - 14th Pollux Award (2019), for her series “Mid+West”

Gold Winner In The Annual Tokyo International Foto Awards for her series, Coming Into Focus. Her work was exhibited at the ICA Gallery, Tokyo from May 12-16 2018.

She was awarded “Special Photographer of The Year” in the 2017 International Photography Awards.

She was one of 15 women photographers chosen to receive the Julia Margaret Cameron Award. This is quite a distinction in the photography world honoring women photographers. Along with the honor, Ellen participated in the Berlin Biennial that took place in October 2016.

She was also awarded First Place (Fine Art) in the Moscow International Foto Awards, 2016 and First Prize, Fine Art in the prestigious PX3, Prix de la Photographie Paris for her series “Transplanting Reality; Transcending Nature”.

Amplitude is from my Place of Departure series.

I was working on my series, “Disturbing The Spirits” when my parents suddenly died.

Place of Departure is the work I have done since…..

I feel that my life has fundamentally changed; but sometimes all seems the same. Where did my father go? Are my parents now united? What does a life mean after it leaves it’s body? Does the life-force rise and connect the terrestrial with the celestial or does it evaporate into thin air? These are the questions I am grappling with as I begin my new series; I hope to find my way to an understanding. I now speak with clouds, the earth...with trees. Words fail me.

Connect with Ellen on Instagram at @ellenjantzen.

Location: Grand St & Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Ellen Kozak’s paintings, video installations and artists’ books have appeared in national and international exhibitions. Collections in which her works are found include The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Fogg Art Museum, The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, The Hudson River Museum, The New York Public Library and Yale University Sterling Memorial Library among others.

Her artistic influences draw from a diverse background. While in undergraduate school at the Massachusetts College of Art, Kozak also apprenticed with sculptor Alfred VanLoen. She was an early explorer of video as a graduate student and fellow at The Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Solo and group exhibits of her paintings and work in video include; riverthatflowsbothways, 4-channel video installation at the Hudson River Museum (2018), the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art (2017) and The Sylvia Wald and Po Kim Gallery in NYC (2019); Hudson River Trilogy: Ellen Kozak at The Katonah Museum of Art (2009); Notations on a River: Ellen Kozak at the Hudson River Museum (2001-2002); River Woman, Odetta Gallery, NYC; Ellen Kozak:New Paintings, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, NYC; two shows, Periodical and Site:Sight at Cross Contemporary Art, Saugerties, NY; Ellen Kozak:Recent Paintings, Katarina Rich Perlow Gallery, NYC; Ellen Kozak:New Paintings, Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo, NY; WGBH TV’s Artists’ Showcase; the Koelnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; the American Center for Students and Artists in Paris; and the Osaka Center for Contemporary Art. After returning to the States from Japan, where she lived and taught between 1982 and 1984, Kozak moved to NYC. ​Following an artists’ residency at Yaddo she began to paint in a studio directly on the west bank of the Hudson River in the Hudson River Valley. For twenty-three years Kozak was Professor CCE at Pratt Institute. She has taught at Princeton, UMASS and Seian Art University.

Painting on-site is the cornerstone of Kozak’s practice. In 2012 and 2019 her residencies in Auvillar, France, provided her with a studio on the bank of the Garonne River where she painted and continued working with video. Kozak has studios in New York City and in the Hudson River Valley. Kozak serves on the Board of Directors of Riverkeeper Inc. A recent interview in the blog Painting Perceptions can be read here.

Connect with Ellen on Instagram at @ellen_kozak.

Location: Flushing Ave & Forrest St, Brooklyn, NY

Helen Glazer's photographs are profoundly influenced by scientific insights on the physical forces that shape natural environments, including human activity. A past participant in the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, her solo show of that project, "Walking in Antarctica," will be toured nationally from 2022 to 2027 by Exhibits USA (eusa.org). Other recent exhibitions include the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art and Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

About this photograph she says, "I wasn't thinking of the long history of paintings of bathers when I took this photograph, but when I looked at it later I was struck by how much it reminded me of one. The brightly lit figures against a dark background whose spontaneous gestures lead your eye from one to the next in a symmetrical arc reminds me of a Baroque painting."

Connect with Helen on Instagram at @helenglazer.

Location: Grand St & Catherine St, Brooklyn, NY

Hillary Johnson is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, meditation teacher and healer. Her photography, immersive installations and transformational, embodied practices have two main strands: the investigation of tensions and challenges created when drastic upheavals transform or destroy delicate beauty; and, helping others evolve and expand their capacity for love, abundance, and creativity. She has a background in photojournalism and documentary photography. She is a Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and an MFA Candidate in the Department of Photography at Columbia College Chicago.

Her work is in private collections around the world.

Statement: The Waters We Swim In is a global photography project consisting in black and white portraits of people immersed in water. Each participant experiences a guided process of surrendering to the water, self realization through profound healing of the deepest wounds in conjunction with reconnection to the unique gifts each of us possesses, which when ignited, gives purpose and meaning to our lives.

Viewers and participants alike are called upon to discover mutual belonging and interconnection rather than remaining isolated and incomprehensible strangers in an increasingly divisive world.

The Waters We Swim In is an ongoing global movement. Those interested in participating, collaborating or supporting may reach out to Hillary using the contact page on her website. Hillary is particularly interested in using the project to highlight and bring the healing work to under-recognized individuals and communities around the globe through creating more portraits and sharing this work in non-traditional settings and installations.

Connect with Hillary on Instagram at @hillaryhelios.

Location: Metropolitan Ave & Grand St, Brooklyn, NY

Holly Fay is a Canadian artist addressing ecological systems and natural phenomena. Fay’s large scale graphite drawings are informed by the processes of pattern, ordering and restructuring found within and throughout the complex interconnections of natural systems. The drawing process is a means to visually conceptualize and celebrate the wonder prevalent throughout the underpinnings of the natural world.

Fay’s work is represented in public gallery collections, and has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Fay received a BFA from the University of Regina, and an MFA from the University of Ulster in Belfast. Holly Fay teaches painting and drawing in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina in Canada.

Statement: Water is the universal transport medium of life, performing essential and diverse roles. My recent drawings examine water’s forces, states and forms through large scale works on paper. The drawing process is a means to visually conceptualize and celebrate the wonder prevalent throughout the underpinnings of the natural world.

In this work, created through additive and subtractive manipulations of layered graphite, forms are void of defined boundaries, evoking fluidity and continual flux. Linear marks in the picture plane suggest the multi-dimensional aspects of physical space and the transitory qualities of water, energy, and motion.

Concurrent with the scientifically supported importance, there is also a need to recognize and acknowledge the marvel, beauty and spectacle present in the natural systems and phenomenon which sustain us all.

Connect with Holly on Instagram at @holly_fay_studio.

Location: Flushing Ave & Forrest St, Brooklyn, NY

Joan Perlman's paintings and videos have been widely shown in solo and group exhibitions in the US including at Wave Hill and Exit Art in New York; the University of San Diego Screenings project, the Pasadena Museum of California Art, the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, the Long Beach Museum of Art, Fringe Exhibitions, and PØST Gallery in Los Angeles; and at the Tufts University Art Gallery in Boston, among other institutions. In Iceland her work has been exhibited at the Hafnarborg Museum, the Listasafn Árnesinga Museum and Skriðuklaustur Museum.

Perlman is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Scandinavian Foundation, and the Durfee Foundation, as well as numerous US and international residency fellowships including MacDowell, Ucross Foundation, Musée d’Art Américain Giverny/Terra Foundation for the Arts, France and Bær Art Center in Iceland. She is a participating artist in the 2021 Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss, a project of the Codex Foundation in Berkeley, California.

Video collaborations include an installation created for the Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre in Los Angeles; and video/sound projects with NY electronic composer Laurie Spiegel; British composer Chris Watson; and a multi-channel work with Irish composer Linda Buckley, among others. 

Perlman's video Dispersion was an official selection of the Nordic International Film Festival in New York. Her work will be shown in the upcoming 2021 Currents New Media Film Festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Statement: My paintings and video work are inspired by the changing landscape of the far north. For over two decades Iceland’s volcanic landscape has strongly influenced my studio practice, its spare beauty and active geology inspiring a visual language of expansive light, color, texture and form. My video work records the effects of these earthly forces, evoking the passage of time and fragility of matter and memory. Sound and creative collaborations with composers are integral to their narrative. The connection to this actual terrain is my muse, though my work is as much about transformative energy as it is about place.

The primal power of glacial waters shaping the land has inspired many of my videos. With immersive imagery and sound, they graphically represent these dynamic forces, as surfaces and light change with weather, location and time. These works are meditations on constancy and vulnerability in the remote north's ice and waters in a shifting climate. Dettifoss is a still from this video series, filmed in north Iceland.

Connect with Joan on Instagram at @perlman.joan.

Lisette Morales is a photographer and multimedia artist based in Southwest Florida. Her projects highlight humanitarian, social justice, and environmental topics through visual stories. Lisette volunteers with Love the Everglades Movement co-founded by Rev. Houston Cypress and Jean Sarmiento.

Betty Osceola is a Miccosukee Grandmother who defends the future generations and Mother Earth's right to exist. To learn more about Betty please visit her Facebook groups Walk for Mother Earth and Love the Everglades Movement.

Connect with Lisette on Instagram at @lisette_morales.

Location: Grand St & Catherine St, Brooklyn, NY

Maria Whiteman is the Artist in Social Practice at Indiana University/Bloomington’s Environmental Resilience Institute. Her photography, video, and installation art have been widely exhibited in the US, Canada, and Europe. Most recently, the Grunwald Art Gallery at Indiana University exhibited Living with Mycelia 2020 and Forgotten History, Wind Energy and Gospel Train 2021. Whiteman’s work “Mountain Pine Beetle and Roadside Kestrel” premiered at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival and Rice Media Center. Her photo-essay “Into the Forest” has been published in the Duke University journal Polygraphy.

Statement: My most recent work on symbiosis creates morphologies between human and marine life by remembering that some life forms evolved from the sea. What we imagine as an alien life under the ocean is an entire ecosystem extraordinary ecological importance and its own remarkable bio-morphology. What you see are live footage of marine life fused together with slowly moving bare feet trekking across different terrains marked by the passage of time and space to weave two worlds together. With symbiosis, different organisms not only live and evolve together; they are indispensable and interconnected for each other. Similarly, this work represents a visual symbiosis where one organism lives inside the other, each informing the other’s movement and rhythm. Symbiosis invites viewers to consider what directions we should take as we move into our collective futures, not only by exploring the largest ecosystem on this planet, but also by bringing the often strange and alien forms of life found in the ocean to land. What will be our ecological imprint (foot print) and how will it affect the forms of life, both familiar and strange, that dwell in the ocean that are often naked to the human eye. My bare feet are thus partially symbolic of the decisions we make about our shared future with other forms of life and the care and caution with which we need to move forward. More specifically and broadly, Symbiosis probes our relationship to oil, petrochemicals, and plastics (all notoriously awash in oceans, wetlands, bays, and estuaries) as an ur-commodity that has configured the character, scale and shape of contemporary life. Critiques of oil and its environmental impact are fast becoming commonplace, but explorations of the full meaning and significance of our petro-cultures must explore not just the literal and material but also the metaphorical dimensions of our dependence on oil. How do we end up producing a material that finds its way into the interior organs and destroying organisms under the sea? As my foot moves from one step to another, human energy moves the body and moves my body. Through my work, I want to create a new visual language to understand these intersections of the human-nature entanglement in order to help us think the future in full awareness of the actual character of the physical and mental landscapes we currently inhabit.

Connect with Maria on Instagram at @ecoartist_artist_bioart.

Location: Grand St & Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn, NY

Dart, created by Margaret LeJeune (USA) and Hanien Conradie (South Africa).

This film documents Conradie writing poetry on the surface of the River Dart in Southwest England. Exploring notions of communal and ancestral pain as well as the power of the landscape to transform and heal, Dart weaves together drone footage of a watery ritual with Afrikaans and English audio recordings.

Connect with Margaret & Hanien on Instagram at @margaret_lejeune & @hanienconradie.

Location: Morgan Ave & Harrison Pl, Brooklyn, NY

Danielle Siegelbaum was born and raised in Paris.

After a successful career in Paris in the fashion industry as a textile designer and publishing as an illustrator, Danielle moved with her family to New York in 2007.

Her work has appeared in the New Yorker and Sony hired her to design their Madison Avenue store windows. She has gained critical acclaim with exhibitions in New York art galleries, showing her contemporary paintings , sculptural works of art and Photomontages. Danielle’s work is the fusion of art, photography with a free spirit.

Her rich images are filled with what life is full of visual stimuli, music, noise, static electricity, overlapping cultures and visions, sexuality, fashion, beauty, youth and an overall sense of energy.

Statement: My work is about being very direct, fluid and spontaneous, unapologetically emotional. It’s
ripe with riposte bringing vitality to the narrative, anything but conceptual. My works push the boundaries of art and life; they are provocative and bold with precise intention forcing the viewer through a juxtaposition of seemingly disparate imagery, bringing order to an otherwise chaotic world. 

Each person will interpret my creations in his or her own way. I would like people to relate to my pieces, and feel complicit. Questions will be raised but one is not sure they will receive answers. This is what creates the tension, and tension is essential to art. 

Stimulated by life’s profundities I voyage into, global symbolism and cultural icons, fueled by vivid color, form and patterns; they all work together like riddles or rebus. As artist, I am an explorer, an investigator, curious about social issues and, global societies, which I express in in a vast array of materials including acrylic, canvas, wood, linocut, photography and computer, the convergence all these materials and technics create an elaborate chaos.

I particularly like treating the subject of relationships: cruelty, subtlety, cynicism, love, hate, and the center of it all, family. I believe in humanity, this is my palette; we are a masterpiece, no matter your background and your origin. Humor, irony, derision are also important components in my work

One gallery owner noted that "on the surface Danielle's work is filled with movement, energy, ambivalence, layered images and strong color but when we look deeper than their colorful graphic quality and venture to read the hidden messages of symbols and references within, we find at the heart, society's conflicts, cultural power plays, the pull of man and woman, of mask and reality."

Connect with Danielle on Instagram at @daniellesiegelbaum.