USA
Trends in Water Use
2011
Carved plywood, steel
56 x 105 x 96cm
Adrien Segal is an artist and data sculptor based in Oakland, California. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums, and is published in several books and academic journals, including Boom: A Journal of California, Data Flow 2 and Arid Journal. She works across disciplines and in a variety of three-dimensional media including cast glass and bronze, wood, marble, metal, and clay, as well as two dimensional drawings and digital data-based printed artworks. On her three-dimensional practice, she states:
Sculpture is the means by which I reconcile conventions of reason and fact with an intuitive and emotive experience. I interpret the complex poetics of statistical information by translating data into lines, forms, and materials to reveal trends, patterns, and changes in the landscape that occur over time. Layers of tangible information are communicated intuitively as a refined and contextual physical experience from which knowledge can be elicited.
Trends in Water Use is a data sculpture that graphs national statistics of water usage in the United States over 50 years, from 1950 – 2000. Data contained in the report are embedded within the form. The width of the walls of the canyon are determined by how much water is consumed each year by category, accounting for all water withdrawn in the United States each day in 2000: 408 billion gallons. Since this sculpture was created, a new USGS report (Circular 1441) released in 2015 shows a decrease in daily water use to an estimate of 322 billion gallons per day, 9 percent less than in 2010. The 2015 estimates put total withdrawals at the lowest level since before 1970.
Select Previous Exhibitions
Pale Blue Dot, The Laundry, San Francisco, CA, 2019
Documenting Change: Our Climate, CU Art Museum, Boulder CO, 2019
Imagine Climate, Patton-Malott Gallery, Anderson Rand Arts Center, Aspen, CO, 2019
Education
California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA
