Date/Time
Thursday
18 Apr 2019
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Book Launch

Edward Morris
CSTMS Artist in Residence

Artist Edward Morris of Sayler/Morris and The Canary Project will present his new book, Water Gold Soil, consisting of original photographs, archival images and writing.  The project follows a flow of water from its origin in the Sierra Nevada to its end use in the big agriculture in the Central Valley, utilizing aerial and landscape photography, as well as subtly manipulated archival images drawn from the United States Geological Survey and other sources. In the margin of these images, the artists tell a story of California that begins with the invention of the place name by a 15th-Century Spanish romance novelist and continues through Spanish colonization, the discovery of gold, the ascendency of large-scale corporate land ownership in the Central Valley and the concomitant influence of these corporate interests on water politics. In the course of the talk, Morris will engage various themes including: critical theory of representation—particularly of landscape and of such hyperobject phenomenon as climate change; the naturalization of neoliberal policy; contemporary ideas of ecology; and the notion of the artist as historian.