ERIE CANAL AS COLLABORATOR
Sarah Cameron Sunde is an American, New York based interdisciplinary environmental artist. Her most notable work to date is 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea, a public, video, and performance artwork made in collaboration with water and communities across the world.
art, artist, water, visual
3465
wp-singular,portfolio_page-template-default,single,single-portfolio_page,postid-3465,wp-theme-bridge,wp-child-theme-bridge-child,bridge-core-3.3.4.8,qode-page-transition-enabled,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,,paspartu_enabled,qode_grid_1300,qode-content-sidebar-responsive,qode-smooth-scroll-enabled,qode-child-theme-ver-1.0.0,qode-theme-ver-30.8.8.9,qode-theme-bridge,disabled_footer_bottom,qode-portfolio-single-template-1,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-9.0,vc_responsive

ERIE CANAL AS COLLABORATOR

Category
Project

ERIE CANAL as collaborator

Currently on view:
CANAL AS COLLABORATOR at the Erie Canal Museum, Syracuse
April 17- September 27, 2026

Special closing event / mini-symposium
September 18, 3-7pm

4 video works + 38 Chromaluxe metal prints, varying sizes

Throughout 2025, I worked as an “Artist-in-Residence with the Erie Canal.”  I have been working with water since 2013, but this was my first long-term engagement with an engineered body of water.  I studied the Erie Canal as a complex portrait of the United States itself: an innovative act of engineering built on Indigenous displacement; a waterway that created New York City as the bustling financial and cultural capital of the country but cut through entire Native communities and ecologies and paved the way for the expansionist’s dangerous propaganda of “Manifest Destiny.” 

Through photography, video, mapping, and performance, I approach the canal as both a monument and a wound, a machine and a landscape, a dream and a consequence. My work considers the canal not as a nostalgic artifact but as a temporal, living system whose currents still shape the present. This system continues to organize bodies, economies, and histories, and has the potential to move towards reconciliation and be re-envisioned for the future — if we slow down and pay attention.

– Sarah Cameron Sunde

 

SURRENDER
2025
Sarah Cameron Sunde and Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock Nation)

HD digital slideshow + Series of Chromaluxe metal prints, various sizes

In this series of photos with the Erie Canal, Sunde places her body in direct relation to the water and reaches for it – as witness, as question, as offering. On the cusp of winter giving way to spring, before the canal opened to boaters, Sunde and Dennis explored several sites along the canal’s central section. 

Sunde situates herself at the water’s edge, surrendering to its presence and history, acknowledging the immense human effort that carved it into the land, the environmental manipulation that took place, and the devastating displacement of the Haudenosaunee people. Dressed in the canal’s emblematic colors of blue and yellow, she reaches toward the water not to claim it, but to ask: can there be reconciliation between our engineered past and an ecological future? What does it mean to reimagine the Erie Canal now, 200 years after it was built? What does the water want?

This quiet gesture of presence and inquiry is a bodily recognition of the systems we’ve built and the waters we’ve altered. Photographer Jeremy Dennis captures the encounter, holding space as time passes. 

 

CONCRETE, STEEL, WATER, WEATHER
2025
Sarah Cameron Sunde 

Series of HD videos + Chromaluxe metal prints, various sizes

The locks of the canal perform their own logic: Water rises. Water falls. It makes an entrance, it is held, and then released. Concrete and steel hold water in its place. Gates open. The level shifts. The surface of the water responds. 

Sunde spent time following these changes and listening to the water of the canal, paying attention to its height, the speed of its movement, and the moments when it shifts: “I thought a lot about the topographies (natural and human-built) across the 351 (previously 363) miles of the canal and about temporality — how water and weather inevitably change a landscape over time. I studied the ruins of the Old Canal and captured the encounter where water meets concrete in the current Barge Canal.” 

In SURRENDER, Sunde’s body enters the frame, measuring scale and impact through duration and presence. Here, her body is behind the camera, engaged directly in the act of slow-looking — using the lens to ask questions about ecology and time: “If the canal was once a project of imagination, what might it become now? How can it be re-envisioned for a different future?  What will happen to these materials 100 years from now? 1000 years from now and beyond?” 

 

————————-

THANK YOU to everyone at the Erie Canal Museum (Natalie Stetson, Steph Adams, Derrick Pratt), Canal Corp (Angelyn Chandler and her entire team, Lock Tenders Timothy Storms, Eric Turpin, and everyone at Lock 7), co-Artist-in-Residence Kari Varner, and collaborator Jeremy Dennis.

Thanks to all the people along the Canal who spent time and helped make this work, especially Dave Warner, Deborah Kaufman, and Andy McEvoy in Little Falls; John Montague, Brian Trzeciak, and Jeff Carballada in Buffalo; and Sinead Mac Namara in Syracuse. 

Gallery exhibit design: Lauren Helpern
Media support: Gretchen Burger & Adriana Guiman
Exhibition build: Andrew Saluti and Installation classes in Museum Studies at Syracuse University