ARTISTS & Projects

FICTILIS

Floating Treatments

Floating Treatments is a series of experimental “floating treatment wetlands”– rafts with plants that clean water—using materials from sustainably harvested local plants. Through public workshops and installation and monitoring at several sites near the Wallkill River, the project invites inhabitants of the watershed to combine innovative bioengineering techniques with longstanding Native American methods—to see the river as a growing medium for the re-cultivation of local water stewardship traditions. Project website

Matthew Friday

Future Water Commons

Future Waters Commons reimagines the river as a living commons where ecological knowledge, creative practice, and community converge. Using a boat as a floating research platform and classroom, the project invites students, artists, educators, and residents into direct engagement with the watershed through shared exploration and storytelling. In partnership with the Wallkill Watershed Alliance and the Midtown Kingston Arts District, the boat will travel between the New Paltz Regatta and Kingston community events, carrying a vision of the river not as a boundary, but as a place of connection, stewardship, and collective becoming. Artist website

sTo Len

Impressions for Coastal Constellation Alignment: Wallkill River

sTo Len has been collecting impressions of the Wallkill River through an embodied research approach that has included walks, paddles, audio field recordings, photographs, drawings, prints, and conversations. Len recently collaborated with Riverkeeper and Climate Smart Gardiner on their 15th Annual River Clean Up in April where participants picked up garbage and chose trash items for sTo that they deemed still had “art potential.” Len will be using these objects for a print installation dedicated to the Wallkill River that gives visibility to the trash that winds up in our parks and on our coastlines while celebrating the work of community-led actions that protect the local watershed. Artist website

Lize Mogel

Liquid Future/The Beginning After the End

What does the Wallkill River look like 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, after climate change? This project invites Wallkill watershed residents to imagine fantastic scenarios about the social, enviornmental, and political future of the Wallkill, and to create short videos enacting those speculative futures in, on, and around the river. The videos will be part of an installation for the exhibition. Project website

Nancy Nowacek

Power Objects & (Im)Possible Demands: A Wallkill Ritual

Inspired by ancient ritual and contemporary political unrest, POWER OBJECTS & (IM)POSSIBLE DEMANDS: A WALLKILL RITUAL is a participatory artwork that turns to the more-than-human world of the Wallkill River for kinship and support. Water from the Wallkill River will be freeze-cast, creating power objects from community-crafted sculptures. On July 18th, the public will be invited to offer a power object to the river in a gesture of collective intention and possibility. Each object will flow through the Wallkill to the Rondout, the Hudson, the Atlantic, and beyond, summoning the unseen forces that encircle the planet. Artist website