Every year, on the shortest day of the year, I go to a place I can see the earth's horizon and photograph the last light and first light, making a double exposure.

To build the exhibition, American artist Mary Mattingly has been collecting snow melt and rainwater, some that has dripped through holes in the building’s roof. Cycling water through tubing just below the ceiling, she can evoke the feeling of rain inside the building. Like a large water clock, the building meditates on water-courses. The drips are caught in lachrymatory vessels while the sounds of the droplets hitting the containers echo throughout the space. Eventually the vessels fill, water spills onto the floor and the cycle repeats itself. The drips keep time.

The artwork was prompted by Kòbò Abe’s novel The Woman in the Dunes, a story about two people who must forever remove sand from a building. It is also driven by the speed of geologic change in Glacier National Park, or glacier time. Over the course of nine (Gregorian calendar) months, the exhibition space inside of 5 6th Avenue West will transform several times. Limnal (relating to lakes) Lacrimosa (weeping)

Limnal Lacrimosa is a free public art installation at 5 6th Avenue West. As the days grow shorter, it is open Mondays from 5-6pm by appointment and now also for listening hours on Sunday evenings. (www.limnal-lacrimosa.com)

The US is experiencing not only a substantial economic and public health crisis related to Covid-19 but an underlying public water crisis. Millions of people face obstacles to access safe, clean running water daily. Agricultural runoff, byproducts of disinfection agents, as well as aging infrastructure like lead pipes have contaminated drinking water, especially in minority and low-income communities. In 2014, the city of Detroit began disconnecting residents' water as part of a debt-collection program, and has since disconnected over 141,000 households in an act that the United Nations deemed a human rights violation. Infrastructure repairs, environmental clean-ups, and water privatization have all led to higher costs for individuals. While the cost for water has been rising around the US, the billion-dollar bottled water industry continues to use public water sources at unimaginably low costs for their products. (The Guardian, 2020)

In 2020, additional EPA regulations were rolled back, this time Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. Section 401 gives states and First Nations veto power over industry projects that would impact local populations. These rollbacks make it easier for industries to frack, mine, and build pipelines in sensitive areas. This will affect land, air, and water, creating additional environmental sacrificial zones (mining and fracking have been found to heighten drinking water contamination risk from toxins like benzene, diesel, heavy metal pollution, cyanide and sulphuric acid to name some). New York and surrounding states have used Section 401 to protect residential drinking water numerous times, including by creating high profile projects like the Constitution Pipeline and the Northeast Supply Enhancement Pipeline. Addressing environmental, health, and economic conditions in and around New York City's watershed is a vital precondition for the creation of a more just present and future for urban and rural New Yorkers.

Public Water brings attention to the rarely-seen labor that humans (and non-humans) do to care for New York City's drinking water. The project takes multiple forms, including a year-long digital campaign, large-scale public sculpture, and education initiatives. Watershed Core is a sculptural ecosystem made of steel, reused plastic, reused wood, plants, soil, stone that mimics the natural filtration in the New York City drinking watershed. (http://www.public-water.com)