Post Two

In the ‘WW11: Eye of the Storm’ exhibit, nine artists come together to get their message of their environmental concerns across to the students and community at New Jersey City University. Their projects were as diverse as it could get. 

Amanda Thackray, dedicated her project to collecting water and garbage from the shores of the Meadowlands. In the exhibit, 100 square pieces of paper where hung over the course of three large window arches. The paper was created by using the water collected from the shores. Each paper was marbled by using a Japanese suminagashi technique, and then traced onto the paper where garbage objects found in the same water used to make the paper. In the exhibit she displayed all the pieces of trash she used in a clear box. 

At first, I did not know what the box was incasing. After the explanation It made more sense why a bunch of garbage was in a clear box. However, I was not shocked because it makes sense. We as humans. . . dispose our garbage in improper ways and this is the consequence of it. 

Amanda Thackray - 1,000 Sq Ft

Amanda Thackray - 1,000 Sq Ft

Amanda Thackray - 1,000 Sq Ft

Another piece that stood out to me was created by Sharon Lee De La Cruz. Her piece incorporated sea levels and spiritual aspects. Now this is what shocked me. How do you integrate these two? Well it was pretty simple to her. . . she created it for herself. 

On top of this blue draped podium stood a figurine. The figure was Cruz and Yemaya, which name means the Goddess of the Ocean, as one. It was also wearing a blue dress, which at first looked like it was flaring up or she was Marilyn Monroe. It turns out the flares of the dress was sea levels and how drastic they have changed, especially over the course of the last few years. 

Sharon Lee De La Cruz - Climate Altars (Yemaya)

I did not realize, and I do not think many people do, unless they se(a)e the piece, and how drastically the sea levels are changing. There is this one specific part on her dress where it shows a drop/rise (depending how you are looking at it) of at least an inch or maybe even more. . . this spot turned out to be sea levels in the last 20 or so years. It is crazy to think, that on this planet it is more than 70% water and in some places,  it will rise high enough and cover islands.

Sharon Lee De La Cruz - Climate Altars (Yemaya)

The last piece that really stood out to me in the exhibit was called Re-appropriating Nature, created by Olga Mercedes Bautista. When I was younger, I was in girl scouts and we were constantly doing things to help the environment. We were always recycling, cleaning up the shores in our community, creating fun and colorful signs to get other people involved. Looking at Olga’s piece kind of hurt, because at first, I did not know it was plastic. . . I truly believed it was just a picture of a shoreline and nothing was wrong with it. It was a little painful to later find out what I thought was a tree, was a piece of plastic. It was even more painful to come to the harsh realization that this could possibly be reality. It sucks to think that even though you may be doing everything you can, there are still others unaware of the consequences of living our lives so carelessly will hold in the future. They too, are tricked into thinking everything will be fine, that it is actually wood and not just plastic.

Olga Mercedes Bautista - Re-appropriating Nature

These pieces in the ‘WW11: Eye of the Storm’ exhibit is kind of like one major alarm that you hear in the morning waking you up. It shows the seriousness of our environmental conditions in the simplest ideas. In Chapter 4 of Seeing Power, by Nato Thompson, it was stated “Critique is often not much more than a strategy of using someone else’s inertia to perpetuate oneself forward. This form of participation in an infrastructure is quite common and has long been a part of the avant-garde tradition.”This chapter was talking about social and cultural capitals. As you can see in the quote, criticism is simply the idea of taking someone else’s nothing, and using it for one’s own benefit. The works in the exhibit, took their own ‘nothings,’ plastic, garbage, seeds, wood, etc to create these beautiful works of art and striking messages in each, in hopes of creating some everlasting effect on an individual. 

Speaking of everlasting effects, Joyce Lee, artist of the exhibition ‘State of Dsyunion’ was inspired to create this exhibit after her residency in China as well as when Hillary Clinton loss the presidential campaign. The piece incorporates 3 large media landscape pieces. 

The first piece you see when you walk in is a circular screen display that is a media clip complied of news articles of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. There are also clips of the women’s march and smoke from the fires happening in California at the time. Another piece in the exhibit is a bunch of sand shaped in somewhat of a vortex looking pile. Circling around the vortex are titles of magazine titles. I remember one of them to be ‘lose weight fast,’ and I thought to myself. . . mhm really wasn’t expecting that to be in this exhibit since my immediate thought was more political. However, when Joyce Lee was talking about her exhibit she mentioned that she never saw herself being a political artist, but when Hillary lost it really pushed her to create something with her feelings of anger. 

Now going back and analyzing both the ‘WW11: Eye of the Storm’ exhibit and this one, I have noticed a connection I did not see before when experiencing the exhibits. Joyce Lee stated she wanted to tie in the environment to her piece. She used sand and the weather balloon to both display titles of beauty magazines and newspapers. Also, in the media clip displayed on the circular screen was fire imitating the ones in California. It makes me feel a little better knowing that other people out there, especially an artist whose main focus was on fake news, and media, tied the environment and other important topics to her pieces. 

Thompson, Nato. Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century. Melville House, 2015.