Down By The River is a permanent, thirty-foot long by ten-foot-tall exterior artwork in the newly constructed Gruene Station Retail Building located in the historic district of Gruene within the City of New Braunfels, Texas. The installation blends together custom maps of New Braunfels with digital photography of the Guadalupe River, the town’s central attraction for locals and tourists alike.

Gruene has an intimate relationship with its dense and vast natural landscape. Visitors often come to swim and tube along the river, which runs along the entire length of the historically preserved Texan town

The artwork aims to celebrate this relationship, captivating the complex diversity of this region’s geographical layering

Six individually designed maps depicting several layers of geographic information are stitched together into a type of digital landscape painting, blending vivid colors and hatch patterns into a one point perspective view of the river

Alternatively distributing the image between two surfaces in a deep lightbox, the artwork utilizes the newly composed map as a mask to produce an alternating viewer experience, flipping between a blue print of the Texan terrain and the scenic view of floating down the river.

Project Team: Luiza DeSouza, Zane Mechem

Photography: Michael Haertlein