LAKE ARROWHEAD - The pine trees outside Sant Khalsa's mountain home are dying. Drought, bark beetles and ozone, says Khalsa, have combined to kill off a million pine trees in the San Bernardino National Forest.

People should have seen it coming, the artist says.

"Thirteen years ago, I did a piece on how the bark beetle was going to cause the loss of this forest," Khalsa says, showing some examples of the 1992 installation piece called "S.O.S." "The research was done in the late '80s that predicted this. No one would listen."

Cal State San Bernardino art professor and conceptual artist Sant Khalsa and her cat Willow are surrounded by her photographs. Khalsa is one of 26 artists to win a state fellowship, based on her work on the Santa Ana River.

One might argue that Khalsa herself didn't heed the warnings. She and her husband, David, moved here two years ago and are just completing the renovation of their home, which Khalsa says was nearly unlivable when they bought it. Shortly, they plan to move back to San Bernardino until the fire danger is over.
This connection -- past to future -- and the change it is bringing are nothing new for Khalsa. These elements are unifying themes in the work she has done over the years, work that recently has garnered some important attention.

Khalsa has received several grants and accolades over the past year. On June 6, she was named among 26 California artists receiving fellowships from the California Arts Council. Of the eight Southern California artists honored, she was one of only two outside Los Angeles.

In the past decade, Khalsa's work has been displayed not only locally -- at such venues as the California Museum of Photography in Riverside -- but also at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the UCLA Hammer Museum.

Beginning Sept. 29, her photographs of the Santa Ana River will be on display at Michael Brandman Associates, 621 E. Carnegie Drive, Suite 100, in San Bernardino.

Khalsa, 50, an art professor at Cal State San Bernardino, was recognized by the arts council largely for her photography and multimedia project documenting the changes in the Santa Ana River. The water-centered work has wound its way through the past 15 years of her career, spawning photo and installation exhibits as well as tributary projects using water as a primary symbol.

Her passion for the critical resource even reached beyond her art. She worked with other faculty members at Cal State to establish the Water Resources Institute, devoted to studying the Santa Ana River watershed.

"You can't photograph the Southern California environment without realizing how important water is," Khalsa says. "It's the most perfect subject to bring attention to these issues about how to reconnect to the natural world."

One might not guess, on the basis of such statements, that Khalsa grew up in New York City. She became serious about art, she says, when she began taking painting lessons at age 11. She attended New York's High School of Music and Arts before heading to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, still as a painter. She discovered photography while working on a video project in college.

"I would stop the video every once in a while and say, 'That image is really interesting,' " she recalls.

Photography classes followed. Shortly after graduation, she took a job at Victor Valley College in Victorville as a graphic designer. In 1988, she began teaching at Cal State. By then, she was deep into photographing the region's environment.

Her journey toward water, she says, actually began with fire -- San Bernardino's Panorama Fire of 1980.

"I have this memory of driving from Riverside up the 215 at night and seeing the entire panorama of the San Bernardino Mountains on fire. I really thought I was driving into hell. It hit me to be able to realize the power of nature. The next day I went out and started to photograph the mountains, the fire, the result of the fire."

Before long, water entered the picture.

Things that caught her eye driving over the junction of interstates 10 and 215 led her to begin photographing the Santa Ana River. When the river's flood control project began, she approached the San Bernardino-area's late Congressman George Brown about documenting the work.

"He got me permission to get access to the Seven Oaks Dam," she says. "I would go up there every other week. I learned about water engineering."

The work led to photographic exhibitions and installation pieces such as "200 Years of Freedom," which featured photos of the river as well as sections of sod in raised metal containers that the audience was invited to water. The runoff dripped down into drinking glasses.

Jonathan Green, executive director of the California Museum of Photography, says Khalsa has been prominent in the Los Angeles photography scene.

"I think she's legitimately kind of pushed some of the boundaries of what people think of when they think of landscape photography," Green says. "It's not just beautiful."

Green says Khalsa's work often finds a traditional spiritual connection with the landscape.

"But sometimes she documents horrific changes, where the demands for water and suburbs have really transformed the landscape into something that is much more of an intersection of man and nature."

Susan Rice, program manager for the Arts Council of San Bernardino County and coordinator for the September show, says Khalsa is not only important for her artwork but for her support of art programs.

"It's an honor for us to be able to provide her with a venue," Rice says.

"Paving Paradise," a book of Khalsa's photographs with text by Southern California historian Mike Davis, is due to be published next year. Khalsa also is working on a book project with Cal State San Bernardino professor and poet B.H. Fairchild. Titled "Death of the Heart," the work documents the fading of rural America in the Farm Belt.

She's also at work on another series involving water, photographing the retail water industry. Khalsa says the Santa Ana River continues to influence her work and her life.

"The river has taught me to understand the notion of change," she says as she prepares to move from the mountains, "that nothing remains the same."