Water as Currency @ Mining Exchange Museum
The Mining Exchange Museum presents Water As Currency by local artists Hughen/Starkweather and Joshua-Michéle Ross. This site-specific installation explores the San Francisco Bay Delta Estuary — a vital system shared by 25 million people and diverse ecosystems. Over the past 150 years, this vast interconnected system has been dramatically altered by human engineering built to control and deliver water, and is increasingly fragile in the face of rising demand and climate extremes. Collaborating across disciplines, the artists translate this complex watershed into an immersive, sonic-visual map. Using sounds and materials collected in the field, the artists reference impacts of extraction (of gold, salt, sand, water) and emerging landscapes of restoration. Drawing on visual and aural references to melting snow, gold mining, fog, flood, algae blooms, fractured landscape that flows from the Sierra Nevada snowpack through rivers and canals through the Sacramento River Delta, San Francisco Bay, and the mouth of the Pacific Ocean. The 19-minute immersive soundscape resonates with the paintings and sculptures and was recorded and composed by Ross at sites within the watershed. Presented within the Mining Exchange building in San Francisco’s financial district, this site-specific installation responds to the area’s histories and futures as a center for resource trading, technology, and innovative green solutions. “The historic Mining Exchange building is a resonant setting for this work,” the artists note. “The same impulses that once drove gold speculation now shape how humans value, distribute, and fight over water.”
About Hughen/Starkweather
For over 20 years, Hughen/Starkweather—the collaboration of San Francisco artists Jennifer Starkweather and Amanda Hughen—has explored engineered water infrastructures woven into natural systems in landscapes of the American West. As climate, development, manufacturing, and technology exert unforeseen pressures on increasingly fragile ecosystems, their work aims to center freshwater as a precious and limited resource and to raise awareness of its uncertain future. Solo exhibitions include the Asian Art Museum, Bolinas Museum, Public Policy Institute of California, and the University of San Francisco. Honors include residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Recology, Skowhegan, Space Program, Ucross, Yaddo, and a San Francisco Individual Artists Grant. Their work is in public and private collections worldwide, including the permanent collection of the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
About Joshua-Michéle Ross
Oakland artist Joshua-Michéle Ross is a conceptual and sound-based artist whose work centers on time, ecology, and the restorative power of listening. In response to a visually dominated world, he uses listening as a disarming medium for increased connection with the more-than-human world. Ross has exhibited globally, including the Tang Museum, Brattleboro Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, The Bo Bartlett Center, and Pasaquan. Ross is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation grant through an ongoing residency with Grand Central Art Center in Los Angeles.
About the Mining Exchange
Located in San Francisco’s financial district, the Mining Exchange was founded during the California Gold Rush to trade mining stock and was active until 1967. Today, the historic landmark building is a Public Open Space that houses the Mining Exchange Museum and a pedestrian link between Bush and Pine Streets.