Artist Statement

I am intrigued by the movement of light across natural surfaces and spaces.  Light’s effect upon form is ever-changing and compounded by atmospheric change.  My recent series of drawings are based upon continual atmospheric shifts in the higher elevations of AK and how these shifts create an elusivity of the powerful landscape. The landscape is visible for a moment, then suddenly hidden. It never reappears the same way, which allows for visual interpretation through my drawings. Atmosphere is continually enveloping all that it surrounds, softly muting surfaces it plays upon for one moment, then revealing detailed glimpses of color and form, the next. Atmosphere upon landscape serves as a powerful metaphor for experiences and resulting challenges that enrich, teach and bring a new perspective.

My work is always deeply bound to landscape and expressed through drawings, paintings and torn paper constuctions.  Landscape is subtle and nuanced, that continually captivates, alludes and inspires.

Leslie Landau

I am an infrastructure buff and had already done some research on the New York City public water supply during grad school for architecture. When I was furloughed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, my partner and I began going for long walks and drives together, and I began to pour my extra energy into my photography. One long, meandering drive through the Catskills ended at the Cannonsville Reservoir—the farthest of New York’s reservoirs. I was hooked again. We began visiting more of the reservoirs, and locating the subtle expressions of the system around the city.

Seen through the lens of a global pandemic—a low probability, high impact event—the water system looked a little different. No longer were its monumental aspects—the strong parts—such as the dams and dykes, spillways and valve chambers, the most appealing. If we could get caught so unprepared by a virus, and fumble our initial responses so badly, what did that say about how other essential systems would fare in other low probability, high impact events? Climate change embodies the possibility of many such events of this nature, some of which pose significant risks to our water supplies.

In this context, I was drawn to the ephemeral aspects of our water supply, to begin exploring the system’s fragility rather than monumentality. Thus the clouds, the rains and wind, the shrinking snow packs, the fluctuating water levels; the interaction of the system with flora and fauna rather than stone and concrete, caught my focus. We are already aware of the risks the system faces from terrorism, from fracking, from human encroachment and pollution; and we guard against them. But what do we do if the rain ceases to fall? What use is all the system’s concrete and stone then?

The reservoirs are in a constant dialogue with their sources: the forests and mountains; the clouds, rains and snows, and the winds that drive them. While these dialogues take many forms, in the first part of this series seen here, it is a visual dialogue between the surface of the water and the sources that is my focus. The way their ebbs and flows are reflected on the ever changing reservoirs.

Zachary Newton was trained as an architect and has spent much of the past decade working with major artists to help them develop and execute their work. He also practices as a freelance architectural and exhibitions photographer. His own artistic practice is primarily located within photography, and his work documenting the Japanese architectural typology of the kura has been exhibited in New York, Washington, and Idaho. He currently lives in New York City, but was born and raised in Torrington, CT, where he regularly returns.