FLOODPLAINS: A VISUAL ESSAY

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Now on view through October 14 in the Campbell Hall Elmaleh Gallery is Floodplains, an exhibition featuring different depictions of hydrological time as seen in an installation by artist Montana Torrey and the research of Brian Davis, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture. Davis and Torrey spoke informally about their work on the opening night of the exhibition.

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Montana Torrey is an American artist whose interdisciplinary work employs the landscape as a metaphorical tool to investigate sites of opposition. In her installation, Floodplain (126), Torrey reimagines the ruined city of Wiang Kum Kam in Northern Thailand, when the Ping River changed course and caused the severe flooding that eventually led to the city’s abandonment over seven hundred years ago.

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Using collagraphic prints sculpted into brick-like forms suspended from the ceiling, Torrey reinterprets the city ruins as suspended in time, physically existing in the present, but perpetually tied to the past, serving as a visual representation of the relentless persistence of time. Torrey incorporated sand from the Ping River when making the collagraphs—a printmaking technique she learned during a three-month artist residency in Venice.

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Brian Davis’ research focuses on coastal landscape form and sea level rise adaptation approaches with a special interest in infrastructure, public space, and ecology. In Floodplains, he shares images representing the work of Healthy Port Futures, a research initiative with Sean Burkholder and Tess Ruswick, focused on two coastal landscapes along the Great Lakes: Port Bay, NY, on Lake Ontario, and Illinois Beach State Park of Zion, Illinois on Lake Michigan. Both are important cultural landscapes that are changing rapidly and marked by unique depositional landforms at a regional scale. What undergirds the images is an aesthetics of the coastal lands' processes and effects that is non-figural, yet not abstract.

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Special thanks to Kyle Sturgeon, Assistant Dean of Academic Support and Lecturer in Architecture and the student exhibitions team for making this exhibition possible. The student team members are Vasudha Chakravarty, Michael Gerson, Reagan McCullough, Ziang Zhang, Gwendolyn Hellen-Sands, and Maya Neal. Stay tuned for future exhibitions that bring into dialogue work from inside and outside the School of Architecture.