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• Jessica Veevers, Alberta University of the Arts

In the early twentieth century, many modernist artists experimented with new synthetic media, such as car enamel, and house paint to break free from aesthetic conventions and the stifling academy. Now, increased commodification, packaging and consumption of plastics have led to environmental and health concerns. CFCs in Styrofoam are responsible for ozone layer destruction, and styrene is a known carcinogen (ACS, 2017). Contemporary artists such as N.E. Thing Co., and General Idea utilized plastics as a form of innovation, but also as a form of critique. With bans on single-use plastic and an increasing legislation supporting sustainable energy resources, our politico-cultural relationship with the petrochemical industry has significantly transformed. This panel invites artists and scholars who are working with and/or studying plastics in art making. To what extent has the commercialization and commodification of plastics influenced artistic usage? And how have plastics in art making affected viewership, collection practices, and art historical methods?

keywords: materiality, petrochemical industry, commodification, capitalism, contemporary art making practices

session type: panel

Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through

• Kirsty Robertson, Western University/Centre for Sustainable Curating

In September, 2021, in the midst of a pandemic lockdown, the exhibition Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through opened at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto before travelling to Paris in 2022-23. Conceived and curated by the Synthetic Collective, an art science collaboration, the exhibition had a four part premise based on understanding the complicated relationship between the art world and plastics: first to turn scientific research on plastics pollution conducted by members of the collective into visual materials; second, to include art works from the 1960s to the present that explored the aesthetic qualities of plastics; third to examine how plastics degrade even in the controlled environments of museum storage; and finally, the exhibition was itself an auto-critique with conscious decisions made at each stage to lower its carbon footprint and avoid the use of plastics. This talk reflects on the lessons learned from curating Plastic Heart, introduces the DIY Guide to Reducing the Environmental Impact of Art Exhibitions (a catalogue and guide that was an important part of the exhibition), and advocates for curatorial strategies based in complexity as a method for confronting climate emergency.

keywords: plastics, contemporary art, environmental crisis, climate change, waste, curating

Surface All The Way Through

• Arianna Richardson, University of Lethbridge

I propose to present about my studio-based research practice that revolves around the intersections between environmentalism, materiality, domestic labour, agency, consumerism, excessive decoration, and spectacle.

My practice is relevant to your proposed panel topic as everything I make is composed entirely of plastic: a material that I am endlessly attracted to for its shape-shifting mimicry and limitless supply of exciting surface qualities. As a toxic, uncontainable, and grossly over-produced material, it is also repulsive and surrounds me with dread and despair. It is the tension between these two opposites that drives my studio practice as I work to both deflect and deal with my own conflicting attitudes in a time of vast uncertainty, inexpressible emotions, and constant horror.

Most of the plastic I use is the result of my own consumption habits: discarded packaging carefully cleaned and re-purposed or broken household gadgets. The other place I gather materials from is the thrift store: an endless source of vibrant matter, abandoned craft supplies, and decorations.

In the time I spend crafting with plastic waste (or waste-adjacent) material, I work through my own climate-crisis anxiety, frustration, and despair, each assemblage creating an imaginary, handmade world in which humorous and absurd individual actions can make a difference against the gigantic environmental catastrophe we currently find ourselves in. Using intensively laborious handicraft methods, I mimic the visual language of mass-production completely by hand, turning myself into a mock-machine of capitalism that actively works to de-construct and re-present the messaging of consumer-culture.

My work is dazzlingly maximalist in the way that only plastic-based materials can truly achieve. I employ this aesthetic to invite viewers in to difficult conversations, presenting an exciting and ambiguous space where we can re-imagine our relationship to this material that is simultaneously horrifying and extraordinary, ubiquitous and elusive, valueless and costly.

keywords: sculpture, plastic packaging, craft, waste, excess

Birch Bark and Plastic: The Politics of Materiality in the Colonial Archive

• Erika Kindsfather, McGill University

Two spirit Ililiw (Cree) interdisciplinary artist Megan Feheley created the series Sunrise (2021) to speak to the climate emergency, cultural knowledge-sharing, and the paradoxes embedded within the material and visual register of the work. Cutting patterns on bright orange tarps to evoke the visual language of birch bark bitings, a method of creation practiced in Anishinaabeg communities, Feheley envisions what its continuation would look like in a world without birch bark, a material threatened by the climate crisis and ecological degradation. The plastic tarp evokes an industry built on violent extractive practices on Indigenous land, yet, as Feheley notes, “is utilitarian, recyclable, inexpensive and could survive impending climate events where birch bark may be scarce, entirely extinct, or in other ways unavailable.” This research examines the tensions and possibilities that plastic material represents, bringing together Feheley’s work and birch bark biting samples by Woodland Cree artist Angelique Merasty that are held in the Indian and Eskimo Committee Records of the Canadian Handicrafts Guild folders in McGill University’s Rare Book and Special Collections. Merasty’s birch bark bitings, suspended in a clear plastic folder, are the first instance of the presence of an Indigenous maker in the committee archives, which is dominated by the perspectives of settler Canadian guild members. Yet the plastic folder situates the artwork in the material and conceptual frame of the colonial archive, reflecting dominant methods of determining historical knowledge and configuring temporality. How do these amalgamations of plastic and birch bark biting call attention to the material and epistemic violence of settler-colonial infrastructures? How do they offer ground to challenge oppressive institutional and social formations?

Megan Feheley: Sunrise, Groundswell Climate Collective, accessed March 1, 2023.

keywords: settler-colonialism, birch bark biting, archives, temporality, land

Not Your Everyday Plastics: The Role of the Sublime in Tara Donovan’s Artwork

• Sara Christensen Blair, University of Southern Indiana

Using massive amounts of the same material to create her artwork, Tara Donovan collects everyday human-produced objects such as plastic cups, Styrofoam cups, and plastic straws. Isolating one product at a time, her work illustrates the banality and quantity of the materials, their presentation in potentially infinite forms, and the experience of a large-scale artwork made with familiar items in an unfamiliar context. Her use of materials in a particular space adheres to a simple rule of creation – she applies the same process, to the same material, repeatedly until the sculpture or installation engulfs the space and its limitations. Whether one considers the individual material that creates the whole or the whole as a collective work, Donovan’s artwork manifests characteristics of the sublime via infinity, the repetition of labor, the blurring of boundaries, and the flux between the known and unknown. Drawing upon theories of Immanuel Kant, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, and Frederic Jameson, this paper/presentation addresses and elucidates the role of the sublime in Donovan’s work as it relates to single-use plastics, the environment, and the everyday.

keywords: every day, sublime, environment, manufacturing, infinity

The Disposables: Plastic Technologies for Art Reform

• Corinna Kirsch, Pratt Institute

This paper focuses on a case study of the Disposables, a series of modular, plastic works created by Les Levine in the 1960s. The series utilized new forms of thermoplastics as a form of art-world critique. The Disposables employed new commercial methods of vacuum-forming plastic to produce units in unnumbered series, with potentially millions to be sold to consumers at accessible locations, whether in department stores or by mail-order catalog, instead of as singular art objects displayed in galleries and marketed towards an art-world audience. By creating works in an unlimited edition out of inexpensive plastic, Levine believed that these modular units could change the terms of how art was bought and sold, additionally allowing for greater artistic control over one’s art practice. Made affordable to ordinary consumers, connoisseurs were transformed into what we might today refer to as “users” and their collectibles similarly demoted.

However, the Disposables were not just an art-world critique; they were also a critique of commercial industries that marketed some plastics as high-end while others, e.g., Styrofoam, were intended to be thrown away. The paper utilizes archival information, including financial data and receipts, to explore the type of market-based critique of these works in their original context. Overall, the variable quality of the Disposables reflects the status of plastic in the 1960s as both reviled and revered, prior to its more determined, toxic status today.

keywords: plastic, technology, critique, 1960s