Archive Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture

Curator's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Kim Abeles Sandow Birk | Laurie Brown | Elizabeth Bryant The Center for Land Use Interpretation | Wanda Hammerbeck Andreas Hessing | Sant Khalsa | Skeet McAuley Kathryn Miller | Diana Thater | Post-Landscape Home Page Archive - Fall 2001 Home

Sant Khalsa

I produce artworks to express my ideas and concern about our environment—the place where humanity and nature intersect. My installations and sculptural works are intended to create a contemplative space where the audience can sense the subtle and profound connections between themselves and the natural world. Personal experiences and revelations initiate my research into complex environmental and societal issues including air pollution, water politics, deforestation, land use, and global warming. I also seek related ideas from mythology, psychology, philosophy, and eco-feminism. My goal is the distillation of these ideas, relevant information, and my experience into artworks that may engage the audience on physical, intellectual, and emotional levels, in hopes of raising consciousness and effecting change.

Water and air—the essential life elements required for sustaining life—have been consistent subjects in my work for more than two decades. I have often focused on forests as the source of the “sacred breath” and the “sacred spring.” The two works included in this exhibition continue my investigation into these ideas and the myriad meanings and metaphors present in nature.

Trees and Seedlings: Seedlings are small, one-of-a-kind sculptural objects that address both the fragility and resilience of nature. They represent the cycle of life (birth, life, death, and rebirth) and the promise of new growth. Trees are constructed like Seedlings but are larger in scale. They are installed leaning against a wall like planks of wood are stored and displayed for purchase in a lumberyard. These works are intended to bring attention to the source of the wood and the memory of the forest. All the pieces are constructed from vertical poplar wood planks varying in height and width, and high-contrast gelatin-silver transparencies of a burned forest held between glass.

Watershed is a conceptual work solely constructed with everyday materials that involves the most basic and necessary of life experiences—the drinking of water. The installation is visually minimal while offering complex layers of meaning for the audience to consider through their active participation in the art experience. A bottled-water company has been created, whose product (by playing off the notion that we consume to feel better about ourselves) “gives the consumer what they physically require and psychologically desire.” The artwork addresses the commodification of nature, water as consumer product, and human desire—a never-ending thirst. Watershed is intended to use what is familiar to bring about a turning point in the course of one’s own experience and understanding of our inherent relationship with water and the natural world. The installation includes a warehouse of corrugated boxes (manufactured from trees) holding bottled water, stacked to form a shed-like structure—a watershed; point-of-purchase displays of bottled water offered for sale and consumption; and product information including a mission statement, market research, and a listing of the ideas that went into the development of the product (and installation). Each bottle of drinkable spring water and box is labeled with the product names (creativity, inspiration, change, balance, integrity, harmony, and grace) representing attributes found in the natural world as well as desirable human qualities.