Watershed Cairns: Photography and Cairns by Joshua Rowan & Libby Reuter

Artists Joshua Rowan and Libby Reuter create images that draw attention to places where the land is collecting the water, cleaning and conducting it to streams, and, ultimately, to major lifeline rivers. Believing it is art’s role to make the invisible-visible, and that there is no more important resource for the future than clean water, Reuter and Rowan set out to mark little known waterscapes with fragile glass cairns where one can see the watershed at work or where the natural streams have been harmed or buried. After taking photographs, later to be printed large-scale, the artists remove the cairns and leave the landscape as they found it. By exhibiting these powerful images (identified by their street address and GIS locator), the artists aim for “watershedification” - a broad public understanding of the watershed’s importance. This exhibition will include 35 large-print photographs, many new and from the upper-Mississippi, and several delicate glass cairns.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website