What Water Wants

The Cypress Park Club House was the setting in July for a timely workshop led by artist Rosten Woo. In the building’s arts and crafts room, he guided twelve local high school students through a “noticing” exercise. They examined photographs they had made during a recent visit to the Lewis McAdams Riverfront Park.

One student noticed a lot of algae in the river. It was exactly the kind of observation that Woo and Clockshop, the arts nonprofit that organized the workshop, want to encourage when discussing water in LA. The hope is that further questions will flow. (Is there algae in the river? Are algae good or bad for the river? How do they impact the ecosystem as a whole?)

For this year’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, Clockshop is presenting a series of fresh educational events and workshops as part of What Water Wants, including a new audio tour on the banks of the LA River, held over three weekends in October. Woo says the tour’s soundscape falls between guided meditation and horror, with a custom score by Celia Hollander featuring soothing, spa-ambient music and field recordings juxtaposed with unsettling music and darker visualization exercises, like what a 200-year flood in LA would resemble.

Clockshop and Woo’s PST ART initiatives aim to empower communities with advocacy tools around climate-resilient green infrastructure, inspire them through art, and equip them for shared stewardship of LA’s water future.

Time for a Rewilding

Water awareness has been part of Woo’s journey since he moved to LA in 2009. Over the years, he noticed the LA River had a reputation as being a problem that needed fixing.

From 2014 to 2017, Woo got the chance to explore these issues through art. Elysian Valley–based Clockshop, known for promoting ecological stewardship, approached him about doing an art project at the Bowtie Parcel.

The parcel, an 18-acre strip of land on the east bank of the LA River across from Elysian Valley, was formerly part of a railyard. Three acres of it will soon be cleaned up and transformed into a wetland habitat by redirecting water from a storm drain. Woo created signage that illuminated various concepts, such as views on native plants and ocean desalination (removing salt from seawater).

Sue Bell Yank, executive director of Clockshop, likens the Bowtie Parcel project and Woo’s work there to a speculative exploration of a series of questions: What if we had these remediations all along the LA River? How would that change our whole water infrastructure? If clean water were running through the LA River, could we recapture it for habitat and consumption? What could this mean for our climate future?

Clockshop and Woo’s relationship expanded in 2024 with the development of What Water Wants, a series of walking tours along the LA River. In February and March, Woo guided visitors to sites of ongoing experimentation around soil and stormwater. Guest speakers on the tours included scientists, water scholars, policymakers, and holders of Indigenous knowledge.

While Woo’s work explores what water wants, he isn’t trying to posit a solution in a definitive way. Instead, he says his approach echoes the late poet and LA River advocate Lewis MacAdams’s idea of “speak[ing] on its behalf in the human realm,” a complex and often contradictory pursuit.

Woo has also been surprised that luxury real estate development in Atwater Village has transformed the waterfront into a recreational area with homes built closer and closer to the river. This makes it harder to reconnect the river to the floodplain or create places where it can spread out. Unlike the 95 percent of the river that is lined with concrete, which directs excess water to the ocean, the Atwater section has a soft bottom, making it a focus for rewilding. While Woo isn’t opposed to rewilding, he says that in order to create the conditions for it, we first need to figure out how to better manage the stormwater.

Woo has also realized that LA could reform the way it uses water, allowing the city to take much less of it from other places. Prompted by his art, he wants all Angelenos to take part in considering solutions. As part of his process, he believes it is essential to first touch people’s souls.

Increasingly, Woo sees climate as the place where ecology, human outcomes, and human survival are coming to a head and coming fast. “How can you not do ecological work right now, in a sense? There is no project that deals with the social that isn’t also inherently about climate,” he says. Yank couldn’t agree more. “At Clockshop, the scientific area we’re most interested in is ecology, particularly in relation to land use and natural resources. We are very aware of how scientific concerns impact both our human and nonhuman neighbors as we move forward in an uncertain climate future,” she says.

Heather MacDonald, a senior program officer at the Getty Foundation, reflects on why Clockshop was chosen for grant support and to participate in PST ART. “Sue Bell Yank and Clockshop are really focused on thinking about how to create climate-resilient communities in Los Angeles,” she says. “By using art made by artists out in the landscape as well as workshop-based activations that they can host on-site, they’ve been very effective in bringing engagement and getting input from people who live in the neighborhood. I think that makes their work very exciting for what we want to do for PST ART.”

For his part, Woo’s central approach to art encourages humility and continuous learning. His workshops and tours with Clockshop invite people to observe and listen to the environment over and over. This aligns with Clockshop’s core value of “taking time,” allowing people to question how they can positively impact their environment without rushing to conclusions. As Woo explains, “What Water Wants is an ongoing process. It’s by no means a cut and dried thing.”