NFS

Meredith Drum is an interdisciplinary artist working with video, animation, installation, augmented reality, and various modes of public participation. Her projects center around the cultivation of care for others, particularly the vulnerable, especially non-human life. She is influenced by cinema history, climate justice, her family, friends and cats, multispecies anthropology, swimming in the ocean, cultural studies, walking in the woods, intersectional feminism, science fiction, and contemporary visual culture. Drum’s work has been supported by grants and residencies from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, iLand, the Wassaic Project, the Experimental Television Center, ChaNorth, ISSUE Project Room, the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, and Wave Farm Transmission Arts and the NY State Council on the Arts.

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Water in the Desert 122°F is a meditation on the past and future of the miles of canals that thread through Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona. The largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in North America, the canals were first engineered 2000 years ago by the ancestral Sonoran Desert people. This Native history was destroyed by the construction of the settler-colonial metropolis. This urban space of asphalt and concrete is ill-prepared for the heat that is coming. The summer now reaches 122°F. At 130°, what happens to the city’s vulnerable people, plants, and animals? Adaptation or abandonment?

Soundscape by Andrea Williams.