Margot Meyers | Chapel of the Rivers

January 12 - March 3, 2018 

Washington-based visiting artist, Margot Meyers, will be joining us during PrintAustin to install a site-specific print installation onto the surface of the steps of the Flatbed building. The complete installation may be seen Friday the 12th from 6-8pm. Chapel of the Rivers is an ongoing project that Meyers has installed in several locations and will be on view at Flatbed until March 3. 

"In the mid 1980’s, exploratory drilling began in the remote wilderness area where I was
born, have lived and worked as a commercial fisherman since childhood. Residents
were to discover that mineral rights in this sensitive region had been sold to a private
mining company and that exploration activities had begun. The large mineral deposits
sit far upstream of the inhabited areas of the region: the river mouths which host the
world’s largest salmon runs. Global awareness of the potentially devastating
implications to the region went largely unmentioned for over two decades. More
recently, the profiles of some of these staggering development projects have risen, due
to their unprecedented scope in such an ecologically sensitive area. The specter of
large scale extraction in the subarctic weighs on my mind and fuels an urgency to open
more discussions about the Bristol Bay Watershed that is so precious to me.

I am working on a series of large woodcut panels that each depict one of the six major
rivers that feed Bristol Bay. The rivers are depicted as iconic figures--large, dramatic
black maps that are meant to personify the power and significance of each body of
water. I am reversing the typical pattern of visual cultural appropriation by borrowing
western symbols for value and reverence to indicate spiritual importance of water. One
of the great joys of working as a printmaker is the advantage of printing on various
surfaces and materials, and flexibility when it comes to showing the images. I use prints
as elements in outdoor installations, and am developing several ways to install the
rivers in distinct environments to diverse audiences.The optical effect of my staircase
installations is reminiscent of a giant, opened accordion fold book. It relies on this
specific infrastructure to present the rivers as powerful, winding channels through the
staircases for visitors to climb and descend

The rivers are meant to evoke iconic representations of saints, martyrs, warriors and
other types of venerated figures. I am borrowing visual tools historically used in religious
art that are signifiers or educational tools. Tropes include Halo forms, Islamic tile
patterns, Precious Metals, Silk, Baroque sunbursts and Intricate Laces. With this work,
I hope to elevate the Bristol Bay Watershed that is held sacred by people of indigenous,
northern cultures.

Pairing discordant elements in my stair installations is potentially unsettling and thought
provoking. Cutting and pasting an ephemeral print onto concrete where visitors are
confronted and forced to engage physically is dualistic: it is at once intimate and
somehow disgraceful. Depending on how visitors enter the site, they may be surprised
to find themselves in the midst of an art installation without warning. These installations
introduce untamed topography into a man made structure in a central urban
environment. It places ephemeral & fragile media on display in a site specifically
engineered to survive high volumes of traffic and weather. The temporal nature of the
print is a metaphor for the fragile nature of these river systems themselves. My hope is
that the prints shown in this specific way will build a space where we can consider the
cultural & ecological importance of safeguarding our precious freshwater rivers." -Margot Meyers. 

Image: Egegik River;  Woodcut, Intaglio, Beeswax & Gold leaf on Evolon, installed on the front steps of Flatbed Press.