LOS ANGELES — The Los Angels River is many things to many people and on one recent Saturday evening, for Ashley Sparks, it was art. She was one of a few dozen people who sat down at the river’s edge for the opening of an art activation called “What Water Wants” by Roston Woo.
“One of the things I appreciate about what he does is this relationship between policy and storytelling and nature and history,” she said. “He just has this beautiful way of weaving those things together.”
Woo moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago and says the LA River was one of the first places he visited. For him, the river is quintessentially LA.
“There’s both like incredible beauty and also kind of incredible horror…locked in together,” he explained, “and you sort of see the ways that people, plants and animals can really thrive in a very inhospitable environment.”
“What Water Wants,” part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide, is a half hour audio presentation that involves music, ambient sounds and narration — a kind of guided meditation that is available on your phone at any time through a QR code posted near Lewis MacAdams Riverfront Park.
People are welcome to listen from up on the bike path, but Woo strongly encourages participants to come at dusk, bring over the ear headphones, and get as close to the water as possible. At times, even touch it.
“To get people to just spend the solid half hour just sitting here at the banks of the river,” he said, “watching and observing all the things that you can see if you just are still and look.”
For this piece, he collaborated with Clockshop, an arts organization deeply rooted in Elysian Valley. Executive director Sue Bell Yank says their mission to connect community to public lands and that includes water. The LA river has a complicated history but what water wants, she says, is simple.
“I think water wants to flow, you know, and we have many ways of stopping it and containing it,” Yank said. “It’s important for us to think about what water wants as we design the city of the future.”
Something Clockshop is actively engaged in. They have been a part of developing plans for the Bowtie Parcel, a former rail yard that is now part of the state park system. It’s already pretty parklike. This is one spot in the river that refused to be hemmed in by concrete, she says, and therefore is home to an array of plant life and water birds.
“People have really started to look at it like, ‘oh, this is in our backyard,’” Yank explained. “This beautiful place. What is it? What could it be? I think a lot of those questions are some of the ones that we’re trying to get people to ask and explore through this project.”
Even though you can’t quite ignore the traffic on the freeway nearby, Woo says down by the water, it’s hard not to feel pretty good.
“Sitting by flowing water is like a primarily pleasant, relaxing experience,” he said. “So I am really hoping to kind of tap into that.”
It worked for Sparks.
“The meditative quality of just being able to sit and listen,” she said, speaking softly, still under the spell of the presentation. “Also this potential of what things could be. It just gave me a lot of hope about what’s possible.”