ALEX BORGEN

Lake Michigan: Several interconnected projects came from living 3 years in Chicago, biking at the lake front nearly everyday.  Lake/Body, Variations of Water Music, This is not the Ocean, and otential Hydrogen. Text, photography, drawings, artist books and audio came out of these research bicycle trips. Please contact the artist for more information. 

Excerpt from Potential Hydrogen  (text adapted from journal entries of the bicycle trip around Lake Michigan, 2012)

I bike to the lake, I sit there, observing. Even while I’m still, the body moves without my thought. It is a moment in time. The body has a cyclical sense of being; it understands without knowing, it perceives and experiences. Forming a construction of embodiment.

I am at the lake. I am gathering water, which will evaporate.
eventually
I am at the lake. My cells will shed and regenerate. My body will cease being. eventually
I am at the lake. I am attempting to preserve a moment with pH sensitive dye and paper. The dye will fade, the paper erode.
eventually
I am left with residue. My attempts at preservation—futile.
I see the lake when I am not there. 

Variations on Water Music is an artist book that focuses on my sensory experience of discovering the topography and native ecosystems of Lake Michigan, as well as the region’s sensory similarities to the art of papermaking. Research for this project, in order to experience sensory phenomena, included my ritual-based practice of making paper, organizing a native-plant community garden called The Papermaker’s Garden, and circumnavigating Lake Michigan by bicycle. I used wax, ink, and locally sourced handmade paper from recycled fabrics and native plants grown in the Chicago’s Papermaking Garden instead of information to created a tactile and sensory experience on each page for the viewers. An example of the interactivity include the sound of the pages turning, and are reminiscent of the waves and wind of Lake Michigan as well as the splash of pulpy water in the process of paper production.