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ART AND THE ENVIRONMENT TRASH RUNS THROUGH IT

Leah Wilson offers a new perspective on the human impact on rivers

BY BOB KEEFER THE REGISTER-GUARD

Appeared in print: Thursday, Jul 16, 2009

Leah Wilson sees a river from many points of view. Wilson sees it with the eyes of white-water kayaker who has traveled the world in search of river adventures. She sees it from the point of view of a committed environmentalist. She sees river water as a source of scientific data. She sees it as a repository for human trash. She sees a river, perhaps most profoundly, as offering a sense of place in a chaotic world. Most important for this story, she sees rivers through the eyes of a trained artist. “Tropes” is a small but gemlike show of her painting that’s up at Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts through August. It wraps all those loose threads into a single coherent artistic fabric that makes it well worth taking a trip downtown sometime in the next month and a half.

Wilson, 35, is a newcomer to Eugene. She arrived here last fall from Northern California, where she has lived for most of the past decade, studying art, painting and drawing, and teaching white-water kayaking. “I’ve been paddling on rivers since 1992,” she says. “That’s when I started as a raft guide. That’s been informing my work for a long time.” The quest for white-water adventure has taken her around the world, to places such as Panama, Costa Rica and New Zealand.

Her artistic quest has been quieter and more personal. Like many artists, she grew up drawing and painting. She was raised in Orange County, Calif., where she got her bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach.

In the beginning, her work, primarily figure drawing, was representational and realistic. “I was very classically trained,” she says. “My drawing kept taking on more and more of an abstract quality and eventually morphed into painting.”

That work, increasingly abstract, grew into multipanel paintings that helped Wilson encapsulate a sense of time in her work. But what her art was lacking, she says, was a deep connection to her own life.

And that’s where rivers come in.

Landscapes and Concepts

By the time she was getting her master of fine arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2003, Wilson was struggling with the conflict between her need for personal substance in her work and the demands of the deeply conceptual kind of art she had learned in school. “It was actually rather intimidating to think of bringing the river into the work,” she says. “It was a taboo. Landscape, anything having to do with landscape, traditional things like that … well, San Francisco Art Institute is a really conceptual place. “I finally began to feel more comfortable bringing something more personal and more representational back into the work.”

“Tropes” offers a series of tightly constructed, highly abstracted but essentially representational oil paintings of trash that Wilson found in river water in the South Yuba River near where she used to live in Nevada City, Calif.

The trash, though, isn’t jarring so much as it is organic, a natural part of the ecosystem. Wilson says that perspective reflects her own shifting view of human intrusion. “I was interested in really becoming intimate with it. I found myself gravitating towards the trash that I found. I developed a very bizarre relationship with the trash. I felt like it was just as much a natural part of the river as the rocks in the water. “I would come back and visit the trash. I would see how the trash would change over time. That kind of disturbs me, but there was something that really fascinated me about that trash. “It became a human connection to this really, really wild, powerful area.”

It took her some time to build up the nerve to paint even landscapes, much less litter. “It was very uncomfortable. I felt so exposed. It was really difficult. I struggled for a long time: How am I going to grapple with this landscape issue and not be considered a traditional landscape artist? “I held onto that abstract aspect and I really veiled what I was doing.” It was the realization that trash was part of the ecosystem that helped her lose that sense of veiling and become more explicit in her art. “We are not separate from the whole river and nature,” she said. “So, yeah, I do feel like it’s really the first time I’m not hiding.”

Filling an entire separate wall in the main gallery at DIVA is an array of 65 square canvases, each about a foot on a side, five horizontal rows of 13 canvases each. Each is painted a single greenish or brownish color.

Each is different.

“A Year of Average Colors of the South Yuba River,” as the work is titled, combines the conceptualism of Wilson’s art school background with her love for science — and for just plain getting wet in the river.

Over the course of a year, she used a digital camera to record the color of the water in the South Yuba River at four of her favorite places. Then, she used photo software to assign an exact digital value to the water color.

Finally, she painted a square canvas with that color. Essentially the work is a giant data chart showing the color of the river by location and date and giving averages. The work grew out of her frustration with political and scientific hearings about the water quality in the South Yuba River. “I had a feeling of powerlessness against this bureaucratic process that was going on,” she says. “They didn’t talk about the river as a whole, or the voice of the river. It’s something that’s alive, and it was reduced to process. “I decided I was going to launch my own scientific investigation and do my own report.”

The Willamette may be next

At the First Friday opening in July, Wilson was approached by people with a science or math background who loved the work. She overheard others, of course, saying they just didn’t get it. “It was definitely tongue-in-cheek for me,” she says. “Completely tongue-in-cheek. I learned a lot from it. “Oddly enough, it describes something that was just so beautiful. Describing the flow changes of this place that I have made home. The changes over the year as the color changes. “And ultimately it describes nothing about the river, which is what I felt about all those charts and graphs.”

Wilson plans to continue to paint trash in the natural world. And she’s also looking ahead to a similar conceptual project involving the Willamette River, hoping to expand her observations to include more variables from clarity to unseen pollution. And she has her eye on other river scenes near Eugene. “My next set of paintings actually aren’t going to be trash. They’re from the Leaburg fish hatchery. “Even if it’s not trash, its manipulated riverscape.” Call Bob Keefer at 338-2325 or e-mail him at bob.keefer@registerguard.com.

Colored By Science: Minimalist Rivers

by Suzi Steffen, Eugene Weekly, July 16, 2009

Walk into the large room at the Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts, and look to your left. Sixty-five small wood panels line up on the wall, each a variation of brown, green or blue. What is this — some new kind of Minimalist color wheel? Paint chips gone a bit wild (if symmetrical)?

No: This is California artist Leah Wilson’s vision of a river over time. Specifically, it’s A Year of Average Colors of the South Yuba River: a mathematical determination of an esthetic value. One part fury at a process that excluded emotional, spiritual or artistic considerations, one part Photoshop, the piece provides a compellingly metacognitive, oddly calming look at the intersection of art, science and nature.

Wilson writes in the accompanying artist material that she lives near the confluence of the Yuba and the Bear in the Northern Sierra Nevada, where the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is taking a look at something called the Colgate Project. That’s a hydro-electric project (read: series of dams) that supplies power and irrigation water to various southern California locales. Right now, the power companies have to undergo a relicensing procedure, and a fair number of people living in the watershed want some input into the dam projects. The South Yuba Citizens League (www.yubariver.net) explains the importance of the process:

For the first time in 50 years, four hydropower operators must apply for a new license for their scores of dams and hundreds of miles of diversion canals that segment and divert every major fork of the Yuba, the Bear River, and dozens of important tributary streams.

Wilson says that, as an artist in the middle of a lot of talk about resources and water flow and agriculture, she felt excluded from the process. So she set up underwater cameras at four different spots in the river, took photos and, using Photoshop, averaged the colors of each location, each month.

The year for the South Yuba River art begins in February, when almost each spot averages a nice blue-green. As melt-off begins, Wilson’s color panels move through more turbulent dirty browns and yellows, in most cases returning to a greenish tone — or at least that’s what one might see with the naked eye. Along with the 48 separate monthly panels, however, Wilson set up two separate grid averages: an average for each site for the full year (the 13th panel in each row) and an average for each month (the 5th panel in each column). The final panel, on the bottom right of the 65-panel grid, shows the average color of all of the spots over all of the months of the year.

Long explanation, I know, but as with many Minimalist artworks, the backstory provides more complex meaning. Part of the intellectual and emotional enjoyment of this work emerges when viewers satisfy their curiosity by looking through Wilson’s notes, including legal pads covered in gridded numbers that, in Photoshop, equal colors. Grids, squares, charts and maps provide ways of translating phenomena into human-controlled understanding, but the poignance of this piece comes from the disconnect between Wilson’s passion for the river and her community’s ability to make decisions about their own environment.