Raft for László
Collaborative project produced with Andy Holtin
This installation is about the difficulty of conceptualizing the lifespan of materials that impact our environment, specifically single-use plastics. The artists, along with friends of the gallery, collected the plastics they encountered in the weeks leading up to the exhibition. While we try to avoid them, the advantages the material provides can be difficult to replace: fresh food, hygienic products, sterile medicines.
These items were then assembled to create “rafts” – sculpted piles of plastics floating in shallow pools of water. These rafts are illuminated from within and activated by small fans, allowing them to drift endlessly on their small, windy oceans and cast the magnified shadows of their contents throughout the space, resulting in a repulsive beauty that is perhaps not unlike our relationship to the material itself.
The title references the work of László Moholy-Nagy, one of the first artists in the early 20th century to begin incorporating newly developed plastics into artworks, and the complex and convoluted connections between artmaking, consumption, and sustainability.