The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me from side to side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, muck…The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection

Dirty Wet is an exploration of liminal spaces found along the most polluted river on the continent: the New River, a river made of corporate pollutants and agricultural run-off, which flows 74 miles between Baja, Mexico, and Imperial County, California.

The New River was born after a Colorado River dam broke a century ago. It has since been fed by under-treated sewage, manufacturing wastewater, and agricultural run-off. These contributors result from the extractive “Free Trade Zone” practices of multinational export-based corporations in the area, governmental laxity on both sides of the border, and the siphoning of the Colorado River for agriculture. Attempts to clean up the river have long been deliberately underfunded. The river courses through communities where rural, low-income people currently live.

After discovering images of migrants wading through the New River to enter the US, I became attracted to the river as a place of convergence: accessible, polluted, liminal, a place where inside and outside meet and are confused. In the days that followed, I asked twelve friends to send me a pair of their underwear with a note revealing something significant or banal related to the underwear.

On five occasions, I traveled to the New River to float the underwear on the water's surface, documenting its travels and eventual immersion. I photographed these floats on a Holga camera using 120 film. I knew that I was doing nothing to purify the river. In fact, I was adding more pollution to it, but over time the floating underwear became for me an act of intimacy—complicated, as femme undergarments are, too, a place of so much convergence: gender performativity driven by erotic desire, but also as a liminal space, a swatch of fabric, in contact with the female body, where the inside and the outside meet.