Krisanne Baker

This work conceptualizes the current dangers of water -- from the local to the global, oceans to mud puddles. Specifically, I am concerned with water quality and water availability; all of our lives hinge upon it. Global warming, rerouted, polluted, or pumped dry water sources result in degraded changes in the environment and living conditions of all populations. Faced with environmental uncertainties, we need to rethink assumptions concerning conditions within reach of and beyond our own experiences. It's necessary to remember the limits of the give and take system between this planet and its inhabitants.

‘What’s in YOUR Water?’ 2008 is a take-off from the Capital One credit card company media campaign, “What’s in your wallet?” The work utilizes mostly recycled materials, text, and research thematically based upon cyclical entropy and regeneration – what I call ‘regenerentropic’ conditions. 24 Samples of tap water donated by friends from different locations in the United States are sealed within stacked glass containers from a local recycling center. This sculpture is one of a series of 12 composing a spiral installation of ‘Water Cores’; the form references the study of the earth through ice cores. Some sculptures are growing algae, some are soluble solutions of roadside rust, and some are crystal clear. Despite the clarity of the latter, we need to question our current environmental practices.

We grew up thinking the tap water was safe to drink. Now multinational corporations have brained-washed the populace into thinking it is unsafe, and that we must buy their bottled water. What is in your water is probably pretty close to what’s in their water, at least in the United States. The over-riding problem is that there are too many chemicals in all waters. So-called purified water, whether from the tap or from a plastic bottle still contains many chemicals that are not removed. In a questioning dialogue with the viewer about ‘What’s in YOUR water?’, I hope to stir awareness, and even motivate people to action in a renewed caretaker position for our planet’s water systems – the lifeblood of all. To help change the politics that control water rights, please see http://www.watertreaty.org/.

‘Threat to survival’ is the concept that through further entropic decline1, there will not be enough potable water to sustain all living creatures on planet Earth. The decline manifests over more than a century of neglect and pollution, over-utilization of natural resources, growing industrialization and agribusiness, and most recently the privatization and commoditization of water. These compounding factors also weigh most heavily in early effects of global warming with changes in climate, weather patterns, acidification of our oceans, and rising sea levels.

In the case of worldwide waters and access rights to potable water, the paradigm of the crisis is that the minority (in this case politics and corporations) is transgressing the majority (the environment and its inhabitants). Ironically, the minority holds the power to control water—or as Christopher Manes says, we are experiencing “economic rage against the marginalization of the underclass and the monolithic power of multinational corporations. And there is a growing green rage against the destruction of the Earth and its breathtaking profusion of life.”2 For our fractured earth, we can reverse all of these entropic trends with ecological artists leading the way.

What's in YOUR Water?