Brackish Water Los Angeles
Opening August 12, 2024
The University Art Gallery presents Brackish Water Los Angeles, co-directed by gallery director Aandrea Stang and independent curator Debra Scacco. The exhibition will open August 12, 2024, and is the culmination of a four-year art and research project which is part of Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.
PST ART (previously known as Pacific Standard Time) engages over 70 cultural, scientific, and community organizations, supported by nearly $20 million in grants from Getty. This year, the initiative’s third iteration will present more than 60 exhibitions and programs exploring the intersections of art and science.
Brackish Water Los Angeles examines the ecosystems, infrastructures, and politics surrounding brackish water, which refers to the space where salt and fresh waters meet. The project considers the larger implications of in-betweenness, including issues of access, inclusion, ecological racism, and cultural/class system interchanges along Los Angeles’ waterways.
In the forthcoming exhibition, visitors will engage with contemporary and historical artworks, as well as objects from the natural world. Participating artists include Laura Aguilar, Judith Baca, Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio, Laddie John Dill, Nancy Baker Cahill, Mercedes Dorame, Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, Alfredo Jaar, Jenny Kendler, David Maisel, Kori Newkirk, Catherine Opie, Emma Robbins, Alison Saar, Shinique Smith, and Isaac Michael Ybarra, with additional objects from the collections of the Autry Museum of the American West and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. The exhibition will be accompanied by public programming, ranging from artists’ talks to river clean ups.
David Maisel: Proving Ground
“A complex examination from the artist about the choices we have made about how to use our Western lands and the implications of those decisions…. The experience is one of immersion and disorientation, a series of otherworldly landscapes.”
—Rebecca Senf, Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography
Co-published with Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art/Utah State University
Photography by David Maisel
Texts by William L. Fox, Tyler Green, Katie Lee-Koven, and Geoff Manaugh
Proving Ground comprises aerial and on-site photographs made at Dugway Proving Ground, a vast military compound in Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. A primary mission of Dugway is to develop, test, and implement chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs.
The Pentagon granted Maisel access to Dugway to photograph the terrain, testing facilities, and zones of toxic weapons deployment. Proving Ground is a critical response to the formal and political aspects of Dugway, in Maisel’s words, a “hidden, walled-off, and secret site that offers the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society.”