The Leonardo Gallery: Moisture

Frontispiece. Adam Belt, The Yearning Bush, copper tubing, refrigerator compressor, solar panel and battery, 2003.

© Adam Belt

Moisture is an evolving, multi-year, multi-phase experimental desert research project by a Los Angeles—based artist collective. The group, artists Claude Willey, Bernard Perroud, Kahty Chenoweth, Deena Capparelli, Adam Belt, SE Barnet and Mark Tsang, came together in 2002, joined by a common interest in desert-region water harvesting and by a desire to work beyond the radar of the gallery-based art scene.

Keen to have a project focused on water retention in the desert, the California-based Center for Land Use and Interpretation (CLUI) offered the site for what became MOISTURE (Phase 1). The Desert Research Station (DRS), found within the town of Hinkley, California (made famous by the film Erin Brockovich), soon became the locus for the group's initial activities. And so the MOISTURE collective ventured deep into the Mojave Desert, one of the driest deserts on the planet, to carry out a series of experiments.

Working within the confines of the DRS, the group set about building sculptural objects designed to harvest dew and rainwater. In the months following the implementation of the first phase, the group was able to observe the completed works. Many of the components had not functioned as planned, and some of the initial ideas were perhaps too ambitious for the location. For example, virtually no dew falls in the Eastern Mojave region, so the artists refocused on water harvesting, seeking a site with a wash within its boundaries. Willey and Capparelli, with the help of CLUI's Matt Coolidge, began an intensive land search in the area nearby and ultimately purchased 15 acres not far from Harper Dry Lake.

Harper Dry Lake, the central feature of the Harper Basin, can be perceived as a large, flat funnel with its washes flowing toward the dried-out lakebed. As part of a compromised ecosystem, the basin's sparse vegetation, uneven history and present condition are emblematic of modern human development in arid regions.

The current project phase, MOISTURE (Phase 2), has emerged out of a confluence of grand schemes and failed experiments, hard work and research, chance TV and Internet encounters, evolving interpersonal affinities/conflicts and explorations steered by grant-givers and, not least of all, by the ever-deepening influence of the region itself on the artists.

Changes in the Mojave are subtle, and the grand schemes of the first phase gave way to a more modest desire to evoke only slight physical change to the site in Phase 2. Willey, Capparelli and Perroud emerged as the core designers, focusing on ways to create a microclimate that would stimulate and accelerate a small aspect of the site's hydrological cycle. The task solidified: to construct a water collection and diversion system as part of a patterned microclimate built around a series of seven circular gardens.

A working structure was then devised according to each individual's natural inclinations. Perroud took the role of chief engineer of water diversion. Capparelli became the garden pattern designer and plant specialist. Willey accepted the role of remote-sensing technologist. Belt developed a refrigerated copper bush to be powered by solar energy. Belt, along with key documenter Tsang, would also lend hours in the trenches with pickax and shovel (as did a host of guests over a 3-month period). Chenoweth and Barnet moved their own collaborative project up-wash from the site, building a series of underground shelters and setting out blue spheres to be carried downstream by possible flood conditions.

An important aspect of the design of the water systems was added after Perroud, quite by chance, saw a documentary on PBS entitled "Water: The Drop of Life," which included a segment on an ecological rehabilitation project in Egypt. The project utilized a new technology called DriWater, whereby a water-holding, gel-like solid provides consistent subsurface irrigation to plants for up to 3 months. The group immediately understood the potential of this technology. Where it had relied solely on the contingent water-harvest system, the...