The concrete-lined LA River was built on top of a sprawling floodplain, which the land artist Lauren Bon seeks to reveal through a large-scale infrastructural project called “Bending the River Back to the City”. By diverting a small amount of water from the river, lifting it, cleansing it, and spreading it to a network of public parks, (its former floodplain), she renders the utilitarian water management system as an accessory of public delight and education, and begins the long process of restoring the floodplain to its natural state.
Much of Bon’s artwork is focused on closing the gap between the natural world and public life, and in this conversation she discusses the role of the artist in translating the abstraction of both natural systems and human infrastructure into experiences that are tangible and culturally meaningful. Bon also discusses her earlier work “Not a Cornfield” - in many ways a precursor to Bending the River - which aimed to transform a derelict industrial site “back into a public space — a commons — creating the possibility for a deeper public consciousness and a sense of shared ownership of LA’s historic floodplain.”
Power & Public Space is a co-production of Drawing Matter & the Architecture Foundation
Bending The River, Photo Collage 2022
Bending The River, Ceramic Pipe Photo Collage 2022
Bending The River, Site Plan 2022
Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles, CA. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River Back into the City, aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility.
This Penny Stamps Speaker Series talk is co-presented with the Community of Food, Society and Justice Conference, October 17-18. This conference will engage students, faculty, staff, farmers, and the community in rigorous dialogue around the challenges of meeting the nutritional needs of our communities, while also protecting the planet, promoting healthy lives, and ensuring food justice. The conference is free and open to the public, thanks to its co-sponsors: the U-M Residential College, East Quad Garden, Michigan Dining, U-M Sustainable Food Systems Initiative, U-M Sustainable Food Program, U-M Campus Farm, Knight Wallace House, U-M Program in the Environment, Michigan Law Environmental Law and Policy Program, U-M Museum of Anthropological Archaeology, and the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speakers Series.
Artists Need to Create on the Same Scale that Society has the Capacity to Destroy: Mare Nostrum exhibited at the Complex of the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Penitenti in Venice, Italy. This official Collateral Event of the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia was open from May 8, 2019 and run until November 24, 2019. It is an urgent response to the threat of climate change in Venice, the Mediterranean Sea, and around the world.
“The Mediterranean Sea is the smallest of seas with the largest of stories. There are 34 countries currently with so many different cultural traditions surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. I began my work for this exhibition looking at what they all have in common. What I found was contemporary ecological peril that includes our collective continued abuse with almost all the estuaries of rivers taken over by resorts, cruise ships dumping human waste, giant shipping burning cheap oil, oil digging, overfishing—the list goes on. Another common thing that the Coastal Mediterranean has pretty much everywhere (except the Saharan coast) is the Pinetree.
Romans planted them during their empire, and for thousands of years they have thrived. When I had the opportunity to visit Naples last year, I went to the park where the poet Virgil is buried and the park was closed because of widespread death of the Pine trees which made the blowing and falling branches dangerous. Climate change is considered the primary culprit of the death of these very hardy pines. Additionally, great fires are beginning to be part of the story of the Mediterranean as a result. We also share this extreme fire scenario in the Western Americas—from the Canadian North all the way down to South America, the forests are on fire.
Inverted Mediterranean Pine, the site-specific work I made for the small chapel at the Chiesa, is different from my work with Metabolic Studio in that Inverted Pine is primarily a poetic construction; a transference of the life force of a giant Mediterranean Pine that burned in the recent Malibu, CA fires, into a sculptural effigy for the small chapel in the Chiesa delle Penitente. The church has a hole in the floor that reveals the lagoon and the arbor of the sculptural pine reaches toward it while the root ball appears to balance on the alter.
My art studio in Los Angeles, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. At the studio we co-create devices of wonder that operate this exchange. Our work with trees at Metabolic Studio includes the creation of topsoil, strategies to salvage waste water, and the generation of pollinator corridors for example.
The last big fire in California, the Woolsey Fire, came close to burning down my home and did burn down the home of many artists in my close community. In fact, the tree that my work is shaped by, is a Mediterranean Pine found on a friend’s property that had been completely destroyed by the fires. Art opens us to consciousness both our own and other sentient things all around us. It can bring down our defenses and tell us when we escape immediate disaster that everything is alright. Art is in fact a declaration of our interdependence.”
