Absent Present : a series of projects about historic and natural cycles generated in the landscape.

Location: Potomac Environmental Research and Education Center (650 Mason Ferry Ave, Woodbridge, VA)

On View 10/31/2023 - 3/12/2024

Artist's statement

Project 1: Green River/Return (work in progress)

Green River/Return focuses on pathways, confluences and cycles of water. In Massachusetts’ Berkshire Appalachians, Misery and Berlin Mountains’ springs flow to the Green River, then the Housatonic and the Hudson, which empties into the Atlantic at the Verrazano Bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island.

I collected water at Staten Island, and am returning it to the 22 sources of the Green River. I used bottles collected from old, farmers’ dumps and made figures of indigenous and domestic animals to return water to its origins. Each time, I repeated the hope, “May your waters always return.” So far, water has been returned to 7 sources.

The clay from which the animals, reliefs, pitcher and pebbles were made was harvested from the Green River. The Beechwood plank that forms “the river” for the Trout and Sucker fish was a seedling in the 1630’s and part of a beam hewn for a house built in 1770.

- Peter Winant

About the Artist

Peter Winant works on individual projects and in collaboration with other artists. For twenty years, as a founding member of the collaborative group, Workingman Collective, and as a core member of the group, Art Attack, he has engaged in making pieces that question the domain and currency of personal authorship, the context of location and the creative process. The groups’ works have been exhibited/performed/intervened in settings as diverse as PS.1, Artist’s Space, parking lots, abandoned houses and public spaces, and in public and alternative galleries and spaces in Berlin, Prague, Slovakia, Marseilles, Warsaw, Krakow, Chicago, Washington, New York, Butte Montana and the North Carolina Museum of Art. Recent commissions include works for the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia and for Macerich’s development for Tysons Corner, Virginia. Peter has been a three time recipient of CEC Artslink grants. Peter’s personal work has ranged from forged steel, abstractly painted figurative sculpture, to “unarchitecture” structures of conventional building materials, to compositions of painted, fallen branches. His work is in private collections throughout the United States. Peter reviews Washington area fine art exhibitions as a panelist on public television station WETA’s Around Town. He is also a Senior Advisor for Integrative Teaching International, a national group whose focus is on the development of visual art foundation programs for the 21st century.