OSCAR TUAZON: "Water School"

26 Jan - 18 Aug 2019 MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan
Installation Views
Press release

OSCAR TUAZON

“WATER SCHOOL”

26.01.-18.08.2019 / MSU BROAD ART MUSEUM, EAST LANSING

 

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“The Water School has grown out of thinking about what role art making can play in building community and culture.”

—Oscar Tuazon

 

In 1968, engineer and inventor Steve Baer self-published the Dome Cookbook, a treatise on mathematics, do-it-yourself architecture, and off-the-grid living. Three years later he created his Zome Home in the foothills overlooking Albuquerque. The house remains one of the earliest modern examples of passive solar architecture; the sun’s energy is collected during the day and stored in drums of water installed in large, bay windows, which then provide heat during the night.

 

This unique structural system, and the larger countercultural DIY building and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s, form the basis for Oscar Tuazon’s latest conceptual and material research. For his exhibition at the MSU Broad, Tuazon continues his investigations of the relationship between art, architecture, and environmental sustainability, with specific consideration of the exhibition’s immediate context: Michigan and the Great Lakes region.

 

As the title suggests, Tuazon will initiate the latest version of his Water School, while also bridging the conversation in Michigan with the artist’s schools in California and Minnesota. These schools are spaces for formal and informal learning, opportunities to specifically address water, land rights, and other socio-environmental issues, connecting local concerns with national and global conversations. A robust schedule of programs will unfold over the course of the exhibition, the Water School acting as a platform for a plurality of expressions concerning water politics today.

 

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Installation photography: Eat Pomegranate Photography

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