Installation at The Artist Project 2013 Toronto

Waterfall

Some people take lots of empty plastic bottles and try to do something interesting with them. I wanted to avoid doing that.
THIS WORK ONLY REQUIRED 17 PLASTIC BOTTLES. THEY WERE RECYCLED AT THE END OF THE PROCESS.


Our perceptions and experiences living in urban areas have become increasingly mediated by man-made apparatus. 
 Waterfall explores the process of our understanding of the world through cultural associations. At the source of the project is an assemblage of plastic water bottles. These bottles are used to create an original composition. A mold is then created and the composition is multiplied in plaster. The result is assembled to form a vertical structure.
 
 The final work is removed from literal water in three stages:
 The first stage of removal is the selection of the water bottle as a subject. The bottling process  creates individual units from something uniform enabling its commercialization. We associate  the plastic bottle with water. Even when empty we continue to perceive it as a "water bottle". The empty plastic container is related to water only through social association. 
 The second stage of removal is the fragmentation and assemblage of the bottle parts that creates a new abstracted entity.
 The final stage of removal is the duplication of the plaster castings. Only the surface of the abstracted composition remains. The plastic object that once contained water is now fully removed and replaced. Plaster was selected as a medium because it too once contained water which evaporated in the curing process, leaving only a dry porous form.

 As remote as Waterfall may be from literal water it still contains the social clues allowing the viewer to interpret it in reverse and deduce a waterfall. It aims to render more evident the mediation through which we seamlessly remove ourselves from the natural world.