is it still a river when the water is gone?

Is it still a river when the water is gone? is a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Cecilia McKinnon. With sculptural installations primarily composed of biomaterials, McKinnon’s work pairs the codes, tools, and signals of human labor with the cycles of entropy, degradation, and renewal within a conception of geological time. This summer the Rio Grande river ran dry, exposing the clay riverbed for the first time in 40 years. The absence of water has sparked legislative battles as to what constitutes a river. What is worth protecting when an ecosystem is depleted? Where have human tools of language and categorization failed to measure our impact on the natural world?