Mark Brest van Kempen
An image of one component of Van Kempen's work on Seattle's Ravenna Creek Project.
Bay Area environmental artist Mark Brest Van Kempen makes work that reflects on the relationship between human and natural systems. Since the 1980s, Brest van Kempen has combined architecture, infrastructure and ecology in a series of projects at varying scales. At the gallery scale, his installation Cleaning System (2000) monitored the passage of laundry wastewater through a filtration pond with plants, tadpoles and fish before it was channeled outdoors to water plants. At the public scale, from 2002-2009 he designed and implemented a multi-component public art project for the Seattle Department of Parks & Recreation‘s Ravenna Creek Project, tracing the historical and present-day flow of the Ravenna Creek under the city’s streets through the use of signage, viewing stations and daylighting vaults.
He is currently at work on two noteworthy public projects: a signage and sculpture project interpreting the ecology and history of the Rockridge-Temescal Greenbelt and Temescal Creek in Oakland, CA, and an interpretive artwork to complement public tours fo the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant.
(via ecoartspace)
