SASHA VOM DORP
Taos
Sasha vom Dorp set out to see sound. After learning that sounds had form, he started searching for its shapes and for a medium that would respond to its waves. The answer was water. “It ends up opening this wild world,” vom Dorp says.
The sound creates a wave in the water, then sunlight hits those waves, refracting and reflecting. His ethereal, abstract photographs of that process—captured faster than the eye can see—present hundreds of sparkling reflections of the sun. One video piece, 222.22 Hz – Surface Tension 36°24’22”N 105°34’31”W, stretches 10 seconds into 13 minutes. It shows how noise played at a certain frequency creates water droplets that drift over the water’s surface before breaking its tension and disappearing. The goal was to reframe how people interact with simple, everyday elements, like light and water.
“That really is what my work is about—the natural world, the beauty that lies within it, and how precious our resources are, especially living here in the desert,” he says. Vom Dorp knows the realities of that life well: He grew up on a farm in San Cristobal, has used acequias since he was young, and still irrigates his own pasture (in return, it yields asparagus and strawberries). As president of and resident along the Acequia de los Sanchez, he’s keenly aware that if the snowpack is low, crops won’t be watered. And without water, he says, he couldn’t create his work, either.
Basia Irland’s hand-carved ice sculpture with native riparian seeds, Santa Fe River Ice Book VI.
Photograph courtesy of Basia Irland.
BASIA IRLAND
Albuquerque
Basia Irland has traveled the nearly 1,900 miles of the Río Grande twice, documenting the journey for her artwork and activism, including for her Ice Books: Ice Receding/Books Reseeding project. The carved books of ice are adorned with native seeds and represent the scientific knowledge needed to deal with climate disruption and watersheds stripped of their native vegetation. Released into rivers in New Mexico, the U.S., and internationally, the books melt and free their seeds, nudging those waterways toward their former health.
Several years ago, when Irland teamed up with another University of New Mexico professor to teach a course, she asked her hydrology students: “How many of you have been to the river here?” Only a few hands went up in the massive lecture hall. “So that was their very first assignment,” says Irland, who told them, “I don’t want you to take any friends or spouses or dogs. I just want you to go sit by the river.”
Listening to the waterways—as she does weekly, traveling from her home near Albuquerque to visit the Río Grande, “just to be with her and find out how she’s doing”—has also been core to temporary works Irland installed along the Santa Fe River last year. These Contemplation Stations are cocoonlike seats woven from plant material, such as tamarisk, willow, and river cane collected along riverbanks. From these seats, river visitors focus on the water, the pace of a birdsong, the light on the riffles, the smell of a mud-rich river in spring. That’s how it should be, Irland says—that we should take the time to stop, to ask the rivers we rely on for life in the desert how they’re doing, and what we might do for them.
Janette Terrazas, a textile artist, creates natural dyes by combining Río Grande water with cochineal. She documents the sites where the water was harvested and the shifting pH of the water develops a variety of hues.
Photographs courtesy of Janette Terrazas.
JANETTE TERRAZAS
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico
Janette Terrazas has watched what’s left of the Río Grande flow in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, searching for ways to call attention to the inequitable distribution of this river and its water, the systemic racism built into those choices, the problems people face living downstream, and the difficulties encountered by birds like storks migrating through this troubled environment.
“It was impactful to see how these beautiful birds were in the middle of the garbage and polluted water,” she says. “So I started to pay more attention to these and to express through my art what is happening.”
The textile artist, who works with natural dyes, has begun taking water samples, mixing them with cochineal, an insect that typically yields a rich red dye, and using the resulting dye to color sections of thread. As the river’s pH changes due to pollution or heavy metals, the color shifts to shades of gray, purple, blue, orange, magenta, and brown. She’s also making a series of photographs and drawings documenting what she finds along the river from its source in the San Juan Mountains in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico.
She plans to visit Colorado and New Mexico this summer for samples. The photographs and drawings—ducks, egrets, geese, and other waterbirds and wildlife appearing along her journey—as well as renditions of the “color trail” and pH tests are being compiled into a book. “The river is not just something that you can say, ‘From here to here, it’s a river, and from here to here, it’s not,’ ” she says. “It’s horrible what we are facing right now in terms of ecosystem and environmental racism.”
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