Immersive video art exhibition chronicles a year on the Brandywine River documenting the water, landscapes, and people who shape the valley

Chadds Ford, PA, September 19, 2017 — A new immersive video exhibition will merge art and images of nature together at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, opening on October 7, 2017 and running through January 7, 2018. Entitled Dylan Gauthier: highwatermarks, the exhibition will transform the Museum’s third-floor gallery into a 4-channel, 4K video installation with accompanying multi-channel original sound composition--narrating the path of the Brandywine River and documenting the local communities through which it flows. The exhibition is the culminating project from the Museum’s first artist-in-residence, Dylan Gauthier, and is the first time the Brandywine River Museum of Art has presented a video installation. 

highwatermarks presents the river and its people through four seasons, blending views from the Brandywine landscape with on-water shots filmed from a small boat constructed by the artist earlier in his residency. Shot entirely on location in the Brandywine Watershed and surrounding region, the artist traces the flow of water from the River’s headwaters among the farms of Honey Brook Township, PA, through industrial towns like Coatesville and the rolling hills of Chadds Ford, to Wilmington, Delaware where it feeds the city’s public water supply before merging into the Christina River then emptying into the Delaware River.

“The video is at once a portrait of place, the Brandywine River region, and an ethnographic portrait of the community of people who live there, use the river, and find themselves drawn to it. Brandywine means many things to many different people; this film intends to share a little bit from each of them to each of them.” – Dylan Gauthier

Combining video, sculpture, performance and digital media, Gauthier examines representations of nature and the environment while revealing society’s relationship to policy, literature, and care. Over the course of his year-long residency project, the artist engaged with the Brandywine as a public site and investigated the relationships between image and landscape, policy and ecology, and culture, community and conservation in the Brandywine River region. highwatermarks is a micro-level investigation of environmental issues that affect rivers and streams throughout the world, while acting responsively to the river itself, and evolving in shape over the artist’s year-long collaboration with the Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art.

Presented within the context of the exhibition, on November 1, 2017, Gauthier will present an artist lecture reflecting on historical currents of environmental art in the region and sharing research conducted with Brandywine Conservancy staff over his year-long residency. 

Dylan Gauthier is a Brooklyn-based artist, curator, and writer whose work explores ecology, architecture, collectivity, time, media and networks, and utopian systems. He teaches at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

The Brandywine River Museum of Art features an outstanding collection of American art housed in a 19th-century mill building with a dramatic steel and glass addition overlooking the banks of the Brandywine. The Museum is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. (except Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day), and is located on Route 1 in Chadds Ford, PA. Admission is $18 for adults, $15 for seniors ages 65 and over, $6 for students and children ages 6 to 18; free for children 5 and younger and Brandywine Conservancy & Museum of Art members. Guided tours of the Andrew Wyeth Studio, N.C. Wyeth House & Studio, and the Kuerner Farm, are available daily for an additional fee; reservations are recommended. For more information, call 610.388.2700 or visit brandywinemuseum.org.

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Presenting Wyeth & American Art