project overview
BACKGROUND & VISION
As Vulture, artist Dave Olsen, offers potential solutions to the aftermath of our post-industrial world through a series of actions that focus on the presence of pollution. With simultaneously pragmatic and mystical objects, Olsen takes on the persona of Vulture and attempts to facilitate bioremediation in hazardous Newtown Creek. While these acts of decontamination directly address the presence of pollution in this waterway and position the need for people to affect the environment positively, Vulture also points to how equally reliant people are on the environment for survival. Through the lens of materiality, Vulture initiates a dialogue concerning the corporeal dependence on earthly goods such as salt.
Beginning in 2009, Vulture initiated his assessment and clean up of one of the most polluted bodies of water in the United States, Newtown Creek. Located between the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, this estuary was once one of the most highly trafficked bodies of water, and as a result, the creek contains decades of industrial toxins, an additional 30 million gallons of spilled petroleum products from the Greenpoint Oil Spill of 1978, and raw sewage from the New York City sewer system.
CHAPTERS & PROGRESS
In Chapter 1 Olsen focuses on harvesting data from Newtown Creek utilizing his own handmade tools that record the energies and visual information of the creek bed and water.
Chapter 2 proposes the bioremediation of Newtown Creek through distilling water, separating oil, and harvesting salt, while also demonstrating our corporeal dependence on the earthly materials we all too frequently squander.
Chapter 3 is still in the midst of creation. However, Olsen is tentatively planning to walk from the industrial sewage plant along Newtown Creek, carrying clay jugs of the water as a form of protest against the institutions and misguided interests that have failed to protect this estuary.
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For more information on the artist visit: http://www.againstallopposition.com
