Bottled Water

2006, 2007, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015

Water into Wine, 2006

In 2006 I had two friends who were getting married and neither of them drank alcohol. So I thought it would be fun to create a series of bottles of water and put them out on the tables to toast with, when it came time to toast. It actually made more sense than Champagne. We toast with Champagne at a wedding because it is symbolic for the finest wine on earth. We also use the diamond as a symbol of love because its purity, as well as being the hardest substance known to man, with the strongest bonds. In this case, water actually makes more sense than Champagne, because it too can be considered pure (like the newlyweds’ love) and maybe more importantly, we can only survive three days without it. Unfortunately, I don’t have any photographs of any of these bottles, which each had two figures in an embrace, drawn in charcoal.

Melted Snow, 2007

In 2007 there was a really big blizzard, rivaling The Great Blizzard of 1978, and so I brought a bunch of the snow in the kitchen, melted it down in big pots, then (since I already owned all the gear to bottle water) bottled a few cases. I gave eight of the bottles to Ursula Rauh to paint on, which she did. She turned them into magical potions. The remaining cases of water weren’t labeled until somewhere around 2016.

New York City Tap Water, 2012

In 2012, I had another couple getting married who neither of them drank (what are the chances?!) and for the longest time I’d been wanting to bottle some New York City Tap Water. It was supposed to be a joke because who would want to drink bottled tap water, but of course the New Yorkers are so fond of everything that involves New York, that they proudly told me that it was the finest tap water in the world. They told me about the long journey it took to get here all the way from the reservoir upstate. I thought it would be a shout out to the days when we could still drink water from the tap, and that 2012 was such a good year for water. I tried to draw New York centric labels on this small batch.