I AM WATER Billboards 2021
I AM WATER is a public art exhibition organized by Our Humanity Matters and ecoartspace in collaboration with SaveArtSpace. The exhibition consists of ten billboards sited in the borough’s of New York City and addresses our relationship with 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. 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 shows water’s mystery and importance and helps to reestablish, on a deep cellular level, the intimate relationship with water that we have lost in modern life.
June 21 through July 18, 2021
Lisette Morales
1697 top – Basia Irland
Description : Every year hundreds of sadhus (holy person or religious ascetic) and pilgrims begin the arduous Narmadaparikrama, 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. It’s 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!”
Bottom – Maria Whiteman
Description : In her recent series titled Symbiosis are morphologies between human and marine life that recall some forms of life that evolved from the sea. What we imagine as an alien world under the ocean is, in reality, an entire ecosystem of extraordinary ecological importance and remarkable bio-morphology. With symbiosis, different organisms not only live and evolve together; they are indispensable and interconnected to each other
On Grand Street near the corner of Catherine Street in East Williamsburg are 3 billboards: Basia Irland’s Narmada River walk, India; Maria Whiteman’s Symbiosis; and Hillary Johnson’s The Waters We Swim In.
0763 – Top – Joan Perlman
More than twenty years ago, a series of dreams sparked my fascination with Iceland and the far north.
Bottom – Helen Glazer
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.
Corner of Forrest Street and Flushing Avenue: top
07666 – Ellen Jantzen Amplitude
I feel my life has fundamentally changed, but sometimes it 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?
Margaret LeJeune Along with collaborator Hanien Conradie documented 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.
On Metropolitan Avenue at Grand Street are 2 billboards, one on each side, Margaret LeJeune’s film still titled Dart (facing West); and Ellen Kozak’s film still titled river that flows both ways (facing East).
1641 Hillary Johnson 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, give purpose and meaning to our lives.
Holly Fay, Curent 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.
Danielle Siegelbaum 7614- or 1764 Waters we swim in- Dirty Sea
I AM WATER exhibition by ecoartspace and Our Humanity Matters, Brooklyn, NY