6&6 Installation at UAMA

It's official! We've installed the complete 6&6 show at the University of Arizona Museum of Art (UAMA)! The week of Dec 17-21 2018 each pair put the finishing touches on their final artwork, representing the culmination of 2-3 years of collaborative effort. Finally seeing all the pieces together in one place you can truly appreciate the breadth and depth of the 6&6 initiative -- what an accomplishment! The show opened Dec 22 2018 and will be open at the UAMA until the end of March 2019. You can also check out a "behind the scenes look" at the 6&6 art-science process at www.ngen6and6.com.

 


 

 

Last Group Meeting Before Show


Image courtesy of Sarah Clark

The weekend of Tucson's famed All Souls Procession in early November almost all of the 6&6 participants were able to get together for a happy hour and last group meeting before installing the final art pieces at the University of Arizona Art Museum next month! It's hard to believe that almost three years have passed since the start of this arts & science initiative, but the momentum and excitement the group feels getting ready for the final show is palpable. We have created some beautiful art and formed some beautiful relationships these past three years.

Trip to Magic Rocks


Images courtesy of Sarah Clark

In November 2017 we came together again as a group to enjoy the beautiful Magic Rocks (thus christened by our Tay Edwards) in Altar Valley near Tucson, Arizona. The rocks were covered in petroglyphs and made incredible “singing” or bell sounds when struck. After scrambling around and playing on the rocks for a couple hours we sat down and caught up on all the progress each of the 6&6 pairs has been making on their artwork. Folks are rounding the corner on the last few months of the collaboration, and we’re really starting to see the fruit of their labors! Even our newest pair, Kathleen Velo and Michael Bogan, have taken great steps toward making their vision for their artistic collaboration a reality. Deeply inspired by everyone’s updates and ideas, we continued to explore the desert during the warm afternoon hours before saying farewell.

 

 

 

Creating the Canvas: A collaboration between Scott Bennett and Tom Baumgartner


Image courtesy of Scott Bennett

Baumgartner, Tom, Bennett, Scott, Gavenus, Erika | June 15, 2017

Over the past weeks, the MAHB has had the pleasure of sharing the incredible collaborative work being created by the teams of 6&6. Forged by the Next Generation Sonoran Desert Researchers network (N-Gen, www.nextgensd.com), 6&6 is a collaboration between artists and scientists to explore the patterns and processes of the Sonoran Desert and Gulf of California. The MAHB has shared the partnerships of:

  • Ben Wilder and Ben Johnson, working to present the multi-layered story of the pozos, or fresh-water springs, in northwestern Mexico’s Grand Desierto and consider how our relationship to water has changed.
  • Chip Hedgcock and Mark A. Dimmitt, presenting the diaphanous plants of the Sonoran Desert and their unique sparseness through lumen printing.
  • Heather Green and Taylor Edwards, featuring the chuckwalla of La Cholla and how isolation has become its reality.
  • Eric Magrane and Maria Johnson, bringing attention to the by-catch of the shrimp trawling fishery in Mexico’s Gulf of California through illustration, poetry, video, and installation.
  • Kathleen Velo and Michael Bogan, finding ways to combine Kathleen’s underwater photogram work with Michael’s aquatic ecology research on desert freshwater communities.

This week we are highlighting the final team, Scott Bennett and Tom Baumgartner, who are creating the canvas upon which these other projects are positioned. Bennett is a field geologist working with the USGS and Baumgartner is an artist with extensive experience in data visualization and illustration. Together they are creating artistic renderings of how the physical landscape of the Gulf of California evolved through time — over the past 11 million years. In a project aiming to explore the patterns and processes of the Sonoran Desert and Gulf of California, Bennett and Baumgartner’s work provides a sense of how those patterns came to be –the geologic and plate tectonic forces behind the isolated mountains of La Cholla, the critical existence of the pozos, the rich marine resources of the Gulf, and even the desert itself. Baumgartner explains, “We’re going to step back in time and show not only the movement of different land masses but also the topography.”

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New Perspectives on Disturbances and Flow: A collaboration between Kathleen Velo and Michael Bogan exploring the Santa Cruz River drainage basin


The Rillito River, a tributary of the Santa Cruz River near Tucson, Arizona | Image by Michael Bogan

Bogan, Michael, Clark, Sarah, Gavenus, Erika, Velo, Kathleen | June 2, 2017

Kathleen Velo and Michael Bogan have only recently teamed up through the 6&6 Collaboration, but they have wasted no time in getting their project moving forward. Forged by the Next Generation Sonoran Desert Researchers network (N-Gen, www.nextgensd.com), 6&6 is a collaboration between artists and scientists to explore the patterns and processes of the Sonoran Desert and Gulf of California. Velo explains, “We got a late start, because of different incidents and events that took place. We’re not rushing to catch up, we’re just flowing along and making sense of things as we go.” After an earlier collaboration didn’t work out due to diverging areas of interest, Velo and Bogan connected back in November. During their first meeting over coffee they discussed “if, and where, there were some natural connections” between their work, and found that a lot of their interests, and the scale they worked at, aligned very well. Bogan is an aquatic ecologist who researches how disturbances to ecosystems, such as wildfires, droughts, or mining spills, shape the types of species found in freshwater lakes and streams. Velo is a photographic artist who has been working with the topics of water and water flow for about seven years. Velo goes “directly into the source to create primarily underwater photograms that show some of the effects of the disturbances that Michael was talking about, to water sources.”

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