Desiree Duell, American
A Body of Water, 2015
Desiree Duell is a native of Flint, Michigan, whose artworks engages disenfranchised communities and encourage liberation. Body of Water is a community-based installation in which Duell traces the outlines of Flint children and then fills in or surrounds the outlines with the water bottles used by Flintstones instead of their tap-water, creating bodies from water bottles. Some of these bottles are filled with contaminated water while others are aposematically blue from LED lights. This striking project reveals the huge burden placed on Flint by visualizing the amount of water people go through and how that translates from the tap to a plastic bottle, trading lead poisoning for plastic pollution. The combination of countless plastic bottles with the outlines of children ties together the dangers of lead poisoning with the potable water crisis, painting the children as crime scene victims, which they very well are because of government negligence. Label by Tori Erisman