“About Place” Exhibition Features Postcommodity’s Going to Water

The multi-channel video installation with sound, Going to Water (2021) by Postcommodity –  the interdisciplinary art collective comprised of Cristóbal Martínez (Genízaro, Manito, Xicano), and Kade L. Twist (Cherokee) – is featured in the newly opened group exhibition, About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift at the de Young, San Francisco. About Place explores how artists relate to their environments through place – including place as land, heritage, the imaginary, and ways of belonging. 

Going to Water was originally commissioned by the Remai Modern Museum for the Postcommodity solo exhibition, Time Holds All the Answers, curated by Gerald McMaster. The video installation encompasses striking views of lands and skies, both static and time-lapsed, drawn from government operated monitoring systems at Owens Valley, a dry lakebed located east of the Sierra Mountains in California. Overlaid with an expansive and haunting soundtrack, Martinez and Twist aimed to create “tension between the scenic beauty of the valley and the horror of ecological disaster.” Known as Payahǖǖnadǖ or “the place of flowing water” by Paiute tribes of Bishop and Lone Pine, Indigenous peoples have long converged in the Owens Valley area for trade and social life, until the early 1900s when an aqueduct diverting water to the growing city of Los Angeles devastated the area and its lifeways. Owens Lake has been dry since 1926, and along with increasingly nonviable human and nonhuman habitats, it has become a dust bowl that stirs toxic cancer-causing particles, causing adverse health effects to communities that remain in the area.

About Place: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift is the second in a series of exhibitions drawn from the 2022 Svane Family Foundation gift of 42 works by more than 30 Bay Area artists. The exhibition runs through November 30, 2025.