Paper or Plastic?: A Q&A with two "FILTHY" artists

POSTED: Tuesday, August 11, 2009, 7:43 PM

Filed Under: Arts

"FILTHY," a multimedia group show put on by the collective Plastic Fantastic, explores the ecological, economic and societal problems surrounding water. PF members Maggie Nowinski and Krisanne Baker sat down with City Paper to talk about the show.

City Paper: Much of the art in "FILTHY" incorporates plastic water bottles. What do they symbolize?
Maggie Nowinski: For me, the plastic water bottle is such a ubiquitous, peripheral image that we cannot escape. It's an image that brings together all of the problems in the world ' petroleum, the war, societal problems. Plastic is something that is extremely problematic in our society today and for our future on this planet. But water is paradoxical ' we have so many problems in the world with getting people clean water, and here we are paying extra for bottles that are leaking poisonous chemicals into it.

CP: So why use the bottles in your pieces?
MN: They are so available that people are using them in their artwork. Turning something ugly into something beautiful, repossessing, and at the same time recycling.

CP: What made you want to explore these themes?
MN: This is the first time I am making a work that is topical. I have always dealt with my art from a personal perspective. Dealing with all of these water bottles everyday, it just made me think, "Hm, there's something to that," and eventually I allowed myself to form this concept around it.

I almost didn't want to do it. I am someone who tries to live in a conscious way, but not so much through my artwork. In order to keep going, I had to keep asking myself personal questions: How does drinking water from a plastic bottle make me feel emotionally? Physically? Environmentally? It is a toxic, toxic concept. Not even thinking about the plastic leaking these chemicals into the water ' all of the oil that is used to create them, all of the energy. It's wasteful and dangerous.

CP: Your art explores the ideas of degeneration and regeneration. Why?
Krisanne Baker: My original thesis research was based in entropy ' things falling apart. But as I was experimenting, I was picking up things out of the gutters ' little pieces of metal falling off of peoples' cars, and putting them in water to see how they were falling apart, generating sediment and eventually showing signs of life.

So I came out of that with this idea of something from nothing. I had these plastic bags [full of water] up in my studio for about a year, and after they had been sitting there for about a year I noticed that they had begun to grow some algae, and thought, 'They're not totally dead, there's something here.' Even though things look like they're falling apart, the energy is still there. I took that idea and applied it to water quality. Water is the universal solvent. I talk about water being the lifeblood of the earth. It's in us, plant matter [and] even rocks. Things that we think are inert are still affected by water.

CP: Your piece looks like an archaeological sample.
KB: It looks like an archaeological sample, and it was. [Curator Dierdra Krieger] had collected some river water for me a month before, but three days beforehand someone spilled it. Before the sample got knocked over, I noticed that it grows not only algae but shows some signs of microscopic life. Knowing that that is the water that people drink ' even though it does go through treatment plants ' there is still a hell of a lot of stuff in there that the facilities do not filter out.

So we trooped down to the Schuylkill and got some more water. I had not been originally planning on incorporating trash. I had wanted this piece to be all Schuylkill water, but just looking at all of the crap that had washed up on the shore, it was undeniable. It had to be included. It's such a statement about how we treat our water, and how much we need it. I hope that people will become more conscious about the waste cycle, how they deal with it on a daily basis.

CP: How did you become involved with "FILTHY"?
KB: Diedra and I were in grad school together. We never had the same teachers or anything, but we were both very interested in the environment and both ended up paralleling each other with ideas and materials. In our grad show, she did an outdoor exhibit ' the dome (pictured) ' as a com building exhibit, and I had done an outdoor installation, but I was using glass jars from the dump, stacked seven feet high, filled with water from different places. You could see things growing, falling apart.

That particular tower was called 'Whats in your water?' in an online gallery of subversive ecological art. Instead of just looking at the surface, taking something for granted, I wanted to present it as something that people could peer through, see what they were really dealing with everyday.

Through Aug. 14, free, 4522 Baltimore Ave., 215-387-3434, studio34yoga.com.

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