Reused & Recycled
Nov 1, 2019 – Nov 30, 2019
Rebecca Siemering, Tuft Enough
Disposability haunts modern life. Questions of who gets to produce waste and where it ends up, are increasingly central to our collective social, political, and artistic imaginations. However, for much of the 20th century, modern art was far more concerned with how to make things new, implicitly sidelining questions about what to do with the leftover material. Nevertheless, the injunction to “make it new” created its own parallel history. From the beginning, modern art was also collage, combines, land art, and much else. It recombined the detritus of everyday life — Picasso’s papier collé, Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau, Simon Rodia’s Watt’s Tower, to name only a few — and formed a shadowy counterpoint to the imperatives of modern consumption and production.
These works orient themselves around the questions of material, process, and labor. However, by using elements and processes outside the traditional bounds of artistic production, they are not simply concerned with formal methods. Much of the work in this show suggests our reckoning with the ecological and environmental catastrophes of the present and future. One finds works that are melted and dismembered, but also, more hopefully, woven and reassembled.
About the Juror:
Jean Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community. Her work has been widely exhibited in over 150 major museums and cultural institutions, including solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC.
Artists:
Marcelo Macedo, Kate Rivers, Gabriel J. Shuldiner, Marcia Boyajian, Melissa Joseph, Lisa Hein, Darlyn Susan Yee, Laura, Petrovich-Cheney, Doerte Weber, Jessica Moon Bernstein, Rebecca Siemering, Cecil Howell, Mari Skarp-Bogli, Kathy Greenwood, Susan Avishai, Christine Chin, Minsung Keyoung, Abby Cheney, Samuel Schwindt, Sandra Eula Lee, Mary Wong, Claire Watson, Oki Fukunaga, Carol Diamond, Rima Day, Kate Rusek, Jeff Wallace, Sarah Clough, Anastasia Komarova, Emily Newman