Hughen/Starkweather creates artworks that investigate engineered infrastructures that control or deliver water—including dams, pipes, seawalls, levees, and floodgates—and how they are interwoven into landscapes.  With increasing climate extremes, how will these interconnected engineered and natural systems respond, adapt, or fail under unprecedented stressors.

Water is central to their work, and research fuels their process. Conversations with community members—from farmers and poets to hydrologists and historians—lead to further investigation, including maps, news articles, and site visits. With the gathered information, the artists create complex visual forms closely tied to the source materials. The resulting artworks blend abstract and recognizable images including landforms, maps, and engineered systems. Rather than offering solutions, Hughen/Starkweather aims to reflect the ambiguities of the climate crisis, inviting viewers to engage with its complexities from new perspectives.

Their sculptural works in the exhibition allude to past and future impacts of fires and ash on fresh water systems in the landscape. References include the teeth of beavers, whose dams not only deter fires by keeping the ground saturated, but also function as filters for ash and other fire-produced pollutants that enter rivers and streams after a wildfire; conical drill bits that bore deep into the earth to access fresh water aquifers; glass versions of tools used for centuries by water dowsers to find underground water sources; and water as the new gold rush in the American West.