PICKER PRINT GALLERY @ VCP
Featured Artist: Jon Dragonette
Jon Dragonette: When the Wells Run Dry
Opening Reception: Friday December 6th, 2024, 2024, 5-8PM
Exhibition Dates: 12/6/2024 – 12/31/2024
The power of photography lays bare the stark and heart wrenching reality into the Southwestern United States water crisis. So much of the dramatic change in our world is conveyed and lost through obfuscating documentation, but here, with no complex facts or graphs to cower behind, images of barren parched landscapes and their guardians, strangers with somehow familiar faces, speak volumes
Today, farms in the United States’ Southwest are being transformed into mass graveyards. Wilted brown husks of dead crops protrude from the parched earth, serving as tombstones for what once thrived there. Small, forgotten towns, where fresh water once flowed from wells, now struggle, drawing up only brown sediment, as underground aquifers are continually depleted. In this heartbreaking scene, tears of sorrow and despair produce more annual precipitation than rainfall. This is the lived nightmare for many rural, Native American, and farming communities who call this increasingly unstable environment home.
While worsening climate change increasingly spurs drought conditions, water issues are further complicated by a slew of controversies and largely unacknowledged problems: unchecked urban development, state water infrastructure mismanagement, Corporate America’s greedy pursuit to commodify water, and bureaucratic blockades to the Bureau of Indian Affairs addressing the socioeconomic inequities experienced on Native American lands. These issues all play destructive roles, both over-consuming and underserving communities with already exhausted water supplies.
Complex, cumbersome, or misinterpreted narratives (and texts) exploring water issues often further confuse, but fail to persuade those not connected to the territory to sympathize with the socioeconomic and ecological hardships faced there. My portfolio, “When the Wells Run Dry,” examines these narratives through evocatively poignant photographs, transporting those who view them to be face-to-face with horrifying landscapes and unknown – yet somehow familiar — faces enduring the catastrophe of drought. The body of work is meant to impress upon those who see it the urgency and need for education and change.
With more than 60 million people currently depending on food, water, and power produced in the southwest, it is critical – and responsible – for us to recognize that the struggles faced by those in the region today will soon be the struggles the rest of us face tomorrow. If we all know more, we will fight harder to prevent further deterioration before it becomes tragically, inevitably irreversible.
See more of Jon’s work online here.
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How To Have Your Work Featured:
To have a featured 1-month exhibition in VCP’s Print Gallery, participants must be a current VCP member and fill out the online exhibition proposal form (please choose the “VCP’s Print Gallery” option within the form) here: https://vcphoto.org/exhibits/propose-an-exhibit/ If you would like us to consider your work for a show and are not currently a member, we invite you to join today! You can sign up to be a VCP member online HERE.
There is no cost or fee to show your work in the Print Gallery. If you need your work printed for your exhibition, VCP would be happy to offer you our fine-art printing services at a discounted rate.
Work is encouraged to be available for purchase. VCP retains 40% of any artwork sales during the exhibition.