Opening Reception: Jan 30 5-7pm
Gallery hours M-F 9-4pm
Closed on school holidays
The Design Building Gallery is pleased to present Charting a Course, an installation new works by Allison Cekala. Through photography and video, Charting a Course maps the current state of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo River. Over the last 100 years, the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo has drastically changed due to human activity. Poor management, climate change, border walls, and increasing populations in the southwest are among the myriad of obstacles that threaten the river and its adjacent landscapes.
Sections of the river run dry for portions of the year, but the flow of water continues as it has for millions of years. Charting a Course contemplates the river as a wholistic, infinitely complex, and rapidly changing system, beginning from its headwaters in southern Colorado to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico. The future of the river is unknown, but the work acts a document of the present. This work examines how the river is challenged by the human infrastructure imposed upon it and the ways in which its inherent natural cycles persist.
Allison Cekala is an artist and educator. Her work, largely rooted in landscape, investigates the ways in which humans move, shape, and transform their surroundings. Cekala holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a BA from Bard College in Photography and Environmental Studies. Her work has been supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, The MacDowell Colony, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, the Cary Center for Ecosystem Studies, the LEF Foundation and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. She currently works in the Art, Film, and Visual Studies Department at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA and Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA.
Opening Reception: Jan 30 5-7pm
Gallery hours M-F 9-4pm
Closed on school holidays