At the Headwaters
A multi-media exhibition looking at the Calumet River System
Marshall J. Gardner Center for the Arts 540 Lake Street, Gary/Miller Beach, IN
November 2015. Conceived and organized by Lindsey French, A. Laurie Palmer, Sarah Ross
The waters of the Calumet Rivers, in their many arms and forms, connect Gary, Indiana, with Chicago, and Chicago’s many waterways in turn connect the region with global trade and movements of materials. Some of these materials become part of the river water, its bed, or its banks; others are transformed into other things, like steel, fertilizer, and sheetrock; and others are temporarily stored by the river’s edge—sulfur, salt, petcoke. Toxic petcoke, refined from tar sands piped to the Chicago area from Canada, was known in 2015 to blow into nearby neighborhoods causing people to get sick. This exhibition, located near the headwaters of the Little Calumet River, presented maps, photos, video, sculpture, books, sound, and events that explored aspects of the Calumet River system’s history and present tenses, and interactions between human and non-human participants in the rivers’ ecosystems.
A boat trip down Chicago’s Calumet River with students and faculty from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and members of the Southeast Environmental Task Force (SETF) in November 2014 provided the foundation for the exhibition. The group suspended a camera attached to a large red weather balloon behind the boat to map the state of the river and its banks, as well as collecting other materials and documentation. A diagrammatic map of the Calumet river system created from found materials was superimposed onto the floor of the gallery and ran throughout the space, with works in varying media installed around it.
Artists who participated in the exhibition:
Marissa Lee Benedict
Nathan Braunfield
Samantha Chao
duskin drum
Lindsey French
Corey Hagelberg
Brian Holmes
Eric Leonardson
Sarah Lewison
Frances Emma Lightbound
Gulsah Mursaloglu
Thomas Newlands
Allyson Packer
A. Laurie Palmer
Dan Peterman
Sarah Ross
Alix Shaw
Koy Suntichotinun
Jan Tichy
Fereshteh Toosi
Maurice Walker
Patrick Zapien
and
School of the Art Institute of Chicago students in:
KnowledgeLab
EcoSensing and the Soundscape
Experimental Geographies