“Confluence Point, Looking South,” Libby Reuter and Joshua Rowan (location here)
On Friday through Sunday, August 21-23, we will take a camping trip to the Illinois and Mississippi rivers at Pere Marquette State Park, then spend Saturday across the Great River, with multiple stops including the Audubon Riverlands site and the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi, pictured above. On Saturday we will be accompanied and guided by Libby Reuter and potentially a couple of her friends and collaborators. Libby and photographer Joshua Rowan are the authors of the extraordinary Watershed Cairns project, a sculptural and photographic mapping of riverine environments across the entire Mississippi basin, which we will present at Watershed Art & Ecology in October.
Our DIY formula involves multiple vehicles, ridesharing, loose coordination and lots of texting. If you want to come but don’t have a car or tent, get in touch and we will try to work something out. Claire and I will leave relatively early on Friday to secure “primitive” campsites at Pere Marquette State Park, or we might rent two rustic cabins with bunk beds. The park also features an apparently glorious old WPA lodge where we will have dinner and drinks in the unfortunate event of a downpour (http://www.pmlodge.net, there may be a nice room for someone there too).
–On Friday afternoon we will go out to visit some of the nearby spots where Libby and Joshua have placed cairns in the past (https://www.watershedcairns.com). Is the artwork the photograph, the now-vanished glass cairn, the exhibition in the gallery, or maybe the site itself? Could it be your own movement between all of them?
–On Saturday we will travel downstream along the river bluffs to meet Libby in Alton, where we’ll cross the river after stopping for a brief visit at the National Great Rivers Museum on the Army Corps lock-and-dam. On the Missouri side we will visit the Audubon Riverlands site and the Confluence Point State Park, among others.
–On Sunday we’ll break camp in the morning and likely figure out some place to have lunch together on the way back. Real aficionados may prefer to stop at Emiquon Nature Preserve (https://tinyurl.com/emiquon), which is a restored bottomland lake along the Illinois River, and the main site of Ryan Griffis’s video, “When the Landscape Recognizable Today was Shaped.” The video includes a number of artistic collaborators, all of whom will feature in the September exhibition at Watershed Art & Ecology (https://watershed-art.org/when-the-landscape-recognizable-today-was-shaped-aug-29-sept-26).
To join this excursion, just write to us at watershedartandecology -at- gmail.com.