Much of the water in Scottsdale comes from beyond the city’s borders. Mountaintops amass snow and ice, desert heat melts it, canals conduct it to the city - the terminus of this phase change. However, as temperatures increase each year, less snowpack collects in the mountains, more is retained within urban infrastructure, and the natural cycle withers, disrupted. Scottsdale’s drought management plan details protocol for providing water within city limits, but no stewardship strategy can conserve what no longer exists. What is the ultimate effect of managing a natural resource in relation to political boundaries instead of greater ecologies?
Phase Change will make the far extents of the local water cycle tangible, confronting the canal with an mountainous, icy, form. Severed from its native environment, this form has been cut and dissected; sliced into segments like a geode, allowing viewers to enter. The exterior facets are composed of an opaque acrylic skin, while the inside faces are two-way acrylic mirrors. During the day, these reflective faces sparkle in the sunlight, casting caustic patterns, like water made solid. At night, transparency is created from motion-activated backlighting, revealing a surprising thinness to the surface - the piece becomes a hollow shell, sublimated. The interior of each form is lined in colored mirrors, invoking extracted resources native to Arizona geology.
Alternatively revealing the fragility of the forms and infinite reflections of the viewer, Phase Change seeks to call attention to the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem-solving that dominates stewardship and resource management, through inability to prioritize and incorporate the invisibly-connected cycles of the natural world. Phase Change ultimately implies that our response to complex problems like climate change and water scarcity cannot be found in piecemeal solutions, but must instead begin by advancing our modes of thinking to encompass the temporal totality of implicated ecologies - acknowledging cyclical change as the only fundamental constant.
