Betsy Damon: Passages: Rites & Rituals

ecofeminism(s)

by Alex A. Jones, The Brooklyn Rail

ecofeminism(s) is a group show with an ambitious curatorial stance. It looks at the mutual development of feminist and ecological art in the 1970s and ’80s, while highlighting recent ecological art by women. Curator Monika Fabijanska casts ecofeminism not as a discreet movement but as an expansive concept, one that can historicize an underrecognized current in women’s art and help us reimagine the role of the artist in times of collective struggle.

The most striking physical presence in the show is Betsy Damon’s The Memory of Clean Water (1985), a paper-pulp cast of a dry riverbed in Utah. It is a death mask of Castle Creek, which dried up after the construction of an upstream dam. Splotches of red and blue mineral pigments decorate the surface of the paper, which is otherwise colored by the dust of the riverbed and embedded with bits of grass and stone. It overflows the wall onto the floor and the ceiling, but this portion of the cast is only a fraction of the full, 250-foot-long work. Damon’s art is not well known today, in part because the process of making The Memory of Clean Water inspired her to dedicate her subsequent work to water remediation. She started a non-profit, Keepers of the Waters, to improve global water systems and educate people about water quality. The organization’s largest project to date is the Living Water Garden in the city of Chengdu, China, an ecological park that diverts polluted water from the Fu and Nan rivers into a wetland filtration system, from which it emerges clean enough to drink. The system doesn’t process enough water to change pollution levels in the massive river system, but it’s enough to make a point about what’s possible.