JEWISH ART LAB 2020
Title: Water Truck
Medium: Archival Digital Print
Single-use plastic water bottles had been around for 5 years before I started carrying one. They were light-weight, inexpensive, and looked cool. Twenty years later, I’ve been buying bottled water – usually purified tap water – because it’s quick and easy. However, I’m not feeling so cool lately, walking into meetings with a plastic bottle. I’m worried about how environmentally careless it looks. Haven’t I seen the floating plastic islands in the oceans, or the clogged waterways and rivers, or all the littering in the interior? Am I not aware that almost no plastic bottles get recycled into new bottles? Billions of pounds of this stuff ends up buried in landfills.
However, in many places bottled water is the only safe option. And individual containers are an added protection against the transmission of disease. The water truck in this image was parked at the Oceti Sakowin encampment near Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, miles from tap water. I had come here in the summer of 2016 to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline transfer of crude oil across Indian lands and under the Missouri River, where an oil leak could contaminate the water supply.
