The River des Peres runs through St. Louis and eventually marks the southern limits of the city with its concrete riverbed.  In the 1900s the river was labeled a “menace of an unruly stream” as it continually flooded the neighborhoods north of Forest Park.  As a result, sections of the river were channeled underground, making it an "invisible river." It took engineers several tries to run the river underground. From wooden boxes to pipes, diverting the river proved more challenging than when it was pitched to the public in 1916 as a "simple" and "inexpensive" project that demanded "no intricate difficulties" and required "no heroic mood." This exhibition at Gallery Proper uses the history of the River des Peres as a starting point. We decided that the river would remain largely "invisible" in our exhibition as well, and instead gathered together works about the difficulty of reigning in natural spaces.

The work comes from a variety of places: from the edge of a exurban woods in Alabama to the Meramec Caverns in Missouri, from Harvard University’s experimental forest in Massachusetts to an underground lake in Iowa. Source imagery also includes the geological strata of St. Louis, an illustration of old growth hemlocks that introduces a poem by Longfellow, and construction debris sliding down a mountain slope in the Berkshires.  The text comes from descriptions of model railroad landscapes, a pamphlet touting the wonders of Crystal Lake Cave, and hand-painted signs at a forestry museum.  While these sources are far-reaching, we felt that they all resonated with what we learned and imagined about this underground river, the River des Peres.

In addition to collaborative works we made about the Forest in Massachusetts in 2010, at the MDW Fair Fall show case we are also presenting new work about the events at the Haymarket in Chicago on May 4, 1886. This project was inspired by the recent protests on Wall Street.

Click on the image above to see a slide show of works from the MDW Fair.

Spring 2011: "A forest with caves"

Drawn Lots (Regan Golden and Jeremy Lundquist) headed south in March from Chicago. Regan went to find a forest outside Huntsville, Alabama for the exhibition "This is Paul Halupka" at Columbia College (July - August 2011). The result of this search is a series of cut photographs, transfer drawings, and a book, "At the Edge of an Unfamiliar Forest." This project was supported by the Contemporary Arts Council of Chicago. (Preview the book published by Drawn Lots Press here).

In the midst of heavy rain on the drive back, Jeremy stopped to photograph Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. Since 2005 Jeremy has been creating prints and drawings of show caves in Missouri using imagery appropriated from tourist pamphlets.

Although these are both mythical spaces--forests and caves--the reality of our experience of these spaces was defined by limited accessibility. In the forest, movement and viewing was constrained by the dense undergrowth and thick fog. In the cave, as tourists our movements were restricted not only by physical barriers, like fence rails embedded inside the cave, but also because only a small portion of the cave is open to visitors. The images that resulted from both encounters are mainly of blocked or prescribed views, as the focus of our attention became on the relationship between the space, the barrier and the viewer.

Summer 2010: "We've been to this site"

Drawn Lots (Regan Golden and Jeremy Lundquist) embarked on a residency at The Harvard Forest, a Long-term Ecological Research Site run by Harvard University. The Fischer Museum at the Harvard Forest is used to teach the forests' past and hypothesize about its future. We inserted our photographs, drawings and prints related to the research at The Harvard Forest into the museum's didactic displays from the 1970s. We also rearranged displays and made new work in response to the diagrams and texts in the vitrines and the archives. Much thanks to The Harvard Forest for this incredible opportunity. Drawn Lots Press will publish a catalog of the project in Fall 2011.