Billy Friebele created a body of work focusing on urban waterways entitled Slosh Cyphers, which is a part of the Applied Forces group exhibition currently installed at the Arlington Arts Center. Due to the spread of COVID-19 the gallery is shuttered. This blog post is a way to continue sharing this work.
When I am oversaturated with the mediated experience of staring at screens, I instinctively lunge out of the door – zombie-like – to the nearest body of water, which happens to be the Northeast Branch of the Anacostia River. Near the border between Washington, DC and Maryland, this waterway is inextricably linked to a sprawling web of roads, train tracks, bridges, and infrastructure.
Growing up not too far from where I live now, my friends and I sought out these in-between spaces because they were uncontrolled. We enjoyed watching vines wrap around rusting train tracks and rivers pushed up against dirty concrete. The entanglement of human construction and natural flow revealed itself in layers of time. These formative experiences led me to investigate similar forgotten territories in my art practice.
Anacostia River - Photo credit: Chris Furnkranz
The Northeast Branch is a 3.2 mile stretch of stream that winds through Prince Georges County. Tributaries with slanted concrete channels at times guarded by chain-link fences lead from areas of pavement near my house to this waterway.
There is a site that I repeatedly visit with my dog off the paved trail – a thorny slope leads to a small rocky shore. Here, I am drawn to a drainage pipe where water pours down a cement slab into the stream. Someone spray painted a pair of eyes above the gaping tunnel mouth. It reminds me of high school. As I walk around this site, I find the most unusual debris. Baby shoes, plastic jewelry, a weight set, an oversized container of protein supplements, bags of clothes are spread across the ground like a spatial poem. I return to this site through changing seasons and witness the landscape wrapping itself around these deserted artifacts, vines using them for structure, heavy rains washing them into the river and downstream. Plastic bottles bobbing up and down like abandoned ghost ships, are a frequent sight.
One study conducted in 2019, just downstream in Bladensburg, MD, found 441.73 microplastics per liter (MPP/L) in water samples. This number only increases as multiple streams and tributaries join the Anacostia River. Near the Nationals Park, just before the Anacostia joins the Potomac River, 696.05 MPP/L were found.
Watching clear plastic water bottles floating downstream, responding to the changing forces of the water, bumping against rocks, makes me think of the journey these macroplastics take through local waterways, shedding tiny particles with every encounter. I decide to use this movement as a catalyst for drawing.
Gathering objects from the site and combining them with a modular kit of parts, like a boom mic pole, drawing compass, and paint roller, I build a makeshift drawing machine that records the rhythm of the bottle. Dots appear when ripples occur in the water and lines depict smoother passages. In the attempt to capture fluctuations of the river as a two-dimensional record, losses in translation occur, reflecting our inability to fully understand the essence of water.
Similarly, in controlling and containing water for our personal use, we perpetually discard plastic containers. While useful to our immediate human needs, these containers take an average of 450 years to biodegrade. The effects and imprints of our tools echo into the future, marking the landscape far beyond our timeline of comprehension.
450-year curse – Julio Fine Art Gallery, Loyola University Maryland
In an age of the attention economy, algorithms are tuned to catch our glimpses and hold them. I find myself in a constant state of distraction yet always looking for signs of fleeting progress. Perhaps this is what drives me to visit these aqueous landscapes. There is no progress. Barriers melt and time is spongy. As I sit staring into the gurgling rush of water, herons, turtles, beavers, herring, hawks, foxes and deer go about their business. Mating dragonflies land on my drawing. Natural rhythms unfold in slow rippling time.
Detail from Drawing Record from Northeast Branch, Anacostia River - Riverdale, MD (4 Layers from 4 Different Days)
Jenny Odell writes about the Calabazas Creek in her book, How to Do Nothing, “[s]naking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away – all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.” Perhaps this project has been an excuse to step out of time, to leave the productivity grid and explore the hidden in-between spaces. In these gaps, under bridges, behind buildings, water still flows as it always has and nature absorbs the rotting, discarded, traces of our quenchless quest for progress.