NYAB Event - Wopo Holup Exhibition

Wopo Holup Exhibition

CUE Art Foundation

This event has ended.

My drawings are about nature's flow -- its branching and dividing -- and the disbursements of energy. Rivers, traffic patterns, and cultural hierarchies are all forms of this flow.

My public art projects are also about environmental systems. Drawings for the public art projects are made to illustrate and to clarify project ideas, and sometimes they spark ideas for an entirely new drawing series.

The Concord drawing was started when I became involved in a public art project along that river. Segments of the river are drawn vertically on 84" x 18" paper panels to form linear patterns. The river itself is accurately scaled from a satellite view, but north/south and east/west directions are not. The drawing is centered on the Concord River and includes streams feeding it such as the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers. The Concord joins the Merrimack and then flows on to its final destination -- the Atlantic Ocean. The science of hydrology tells us that the Atlantic is not the end of the trip but just one step in the endless cycling of the earth's water.

The metal leaf used on the drawings -- silver and gold, our most precious metals -- acknolwedge treasured sites such as the Nile, the Mississippi, and the almost mythological Sea of Galilee.

Finding new views of these well-known places has been an exciting experience. I was drawn to the plant-like shapes in The Nile beginning with the northern irrigated valley "bloom" to the central river "stem" and finally the southern "root" at Lake Victoria. The Mississippi shimmers in silver ribbons from an airplane view and a satellite image shows man-made deltas competing with natural tributaries as the river flows into the Gulf. The sea in The Sea of Galilee is shaped like a human heart and it is connected by waterways to the Dead Sea -- the two seas like jewels on a river necklace.