VASE LECTURES

The Cyborg Watershed of the American West

The engineered network of lakes, rivers and streams that flow west from the Rockies enable human life to flourish in one of the hottest places on Earth, a “cyborg watershed” that is part naturel, part machine and wholly entangled with the myths and machinery of the region. Bon will trace the path of her large-scale artworks that intervene in this network and blur the lines between art, engineering and activism. Bon will talk about buried waterways, the choreography of permits and politics and the search for a civic identity grounded in the flow of water, instead of lines on a map.

About the artist

Lauren Bon is an American environmental artist and activist and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web.

Part of a global art cohort addressing our current environmental crisis, Bon uses living systems and infrastructure to create durational, large-scale, place-based projects, and performance, photography and sound to activate these works and engage her audiences. Through her multidisciplinary approach, Bon has carved out a space between land art, conceptual art, and transmission art. Her questioning of the status quo and persistent alteration of civic infrastructure demonstrates the power of artists to provoke change and shape opinion through soft diplomacy.

Some of her works include Not A Cornfield (2005-2006), which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct (2013), a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

Her studio’s ongoing work, Bending the River (2011-) aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility. A recent work of disturbance ecology, Moving Mountains (2024-), will use transplanted mountain soil rescued from the Topanga Canyon landslide to create a series of novel ecosystems along the industrial corridor of the LA River.

Website: laurenbon.art
Instagram: @laurenmetropolis

Co-sponsored with:

2025-2026 Visiting Artists