Drip Drop: Water Exhibit at the Zimmerli

The current exhibit at the Zimmerli Art Museum, entitled Water, first sparked my interest when I caught a glimpse of Ross Cisneros’s piece, Ice and Ark, hanging from the ceiling in passing. From there I was led downstairs and into the exhibit that had to do with water in all its elements and ways it is understood in the art community. The Curator, Donna Gustafson, put the show together with works from the Zimmerli’s personal collections and also from work lent by outside sources.

I really enjoyed how the first room with Hans Haacke’s Consensation Cube worked together with all of the pieces in conversation with each other, including Maya Lin’s Dew Point. However, I think that for maximum impact, the lighting on Lin’s piece could have been much more dramatic, with more reflection on the wall. The next section of the gallery also felt a bit off to me. Donna had explained her reasoning for placing fairly recent work, with older, more traditional landscapes scattered about the modern. I can understand that she may have had difficulty finding a place for the older landscapes or perhaps she was just trying it to see how it fared, but I personally think it was too far of a stretch and they seemed out of place. In fact, I think they actually took away from the modern pieces they were near, such as Maya Lin’s Pin River – Hudson, Yvonne Jacquette’s Hudson River Diptych, and Nancy Graves’ Bottom of the Pacific Ocean Between California and the Hawaiian Islands-Sub Cable Survey, 1891-92.

I did enjoy the men in boats/women in the waves room. I found these pieces to go together in a loose way that was made stronger by the pairings. Gustafon paid strict attention to the wall color throughout the gallery, but in this room I think she was happily surprised to see that the wall color transitioned as it went into the next room. This was due to the light from the video projection, Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez Jonas’s Always New, Always Familiar, reflecting onto the wall, altering its appearance.

Continuing in the gallery, I felt that the second and third video rooms were almost too easy to ignore as I went through the room towards the eye-catching piece, Immersions, by Atul Bhalla. But on second glance I did go back and see them. I especially enjoyed Bhalla’s Immersions for being able to walk around and through the different glass cases and really inspect them. The last room, with Immersions, I thought went together well, as the layout had a strong grid-like pattern to it. Both of Bhalla’s pieces and Diane Neumaier’s installation of Fountains from the Fountains and Urns Project all have the strong grid in their set up.