PIPE DREAMS

Hughen/Starkweather’s current body of work, Pipe Dreams, is comprised of sculptures, paintings, and video that reference tumultous landscapes of places where water meets land. As human-engineered infrastructures are increasingly, inextricably woven into ecosystems, how might these natural and engineered systems fail or succeed together as climate extremes exert unforeseen pressures? The term Pipe Dreams references illusory hopes and magical thinking. The work reflects the ambiguities and complexities of our time, while offering glimpses of hope and beauty amidst destruction.

The artists’ begin researching this question by conducting interviews with people from a wide variety of backgrounds including hydrologists, farmers, fishermen, engineers, lawyers, historians, glaciologists, and others. These interviews lead to site visits and additional research by the artists, who also collect materials from the sites they visit including water from rivers and bays, ash from wildfires, sand from deserts/beaches, salt, borax, and dirt, and use those materials directly in the artworks. The resulting works layer past, present and future through recognizable and abstract forms that reference fire, ice, engineered concrete and metal infrastructures, floods, drought, smoke, fog, aquifers, and desertification. 

Below are is a small selection of works from this series, please contact the artists for additional works and more information.