“Matter Out of Place,” an exhibition at the Jane Street Art Center in Saugerties, brings together six artists who use discarded materials to explore waste, destruction, and environmental change ahead of Earth Day.
The show, on view through May 8 at the center at 11 Jane St., features work made from found and repurposed objects. Director Jennifer Hicks said she wanted to mount an exhibition centered on the environment as Earth Day on April 22 nears. Each artist takes a different approach to working with castoff materials.
Olivebridge artist Mimi Young works with natural and synthetic paper. Two years ago, as fires and floods in California dominated the news, she began experimenting with some of her art papers by “saturating them with water, pummeling them,” running over them with her car, and melting synthetic materials before assembling them into finished works.
“These pieces are really about the destruction turning into a creative process,” Young said.
After the exhibition closes, Young said, she plans to run her car over works from her three-dimensional “Bundles” series “to make something new out of them.”
Woodstock artist Elizabeth Keithline also described destruction as part of her creative process. Using discarded plywood for the pieces in the exhibition, she broke and hammered the material into new forms.
“We’re in a pretty destructive time in the world,” Keithline said. “You can destroy something and at the same time be creating something.”
As children, she said, “we’re taught to feel shame around destruction,” a habit she believes makes it harder to confront climate change directly.
Keithline said she is especially drawn to cheap plywood “because that’s where you see the glue lines and layers,” which have “a particular kind of beauty.”
For Venezuelan-born artist René Moncada, discarded objects hold the possibility of transformation.
“If I encounter a broken chair, I don’t see a broken chair, I see material with which I could create something that won’t resemble a chair,” he said.
Moncada traced that outlook to a formative experience in 1972, when he came across a beach in Venezuela strewn with trash. After cleaning it, he returned “with a hammer and nails and proceeded to make a sculpture out of the wood and plastic trash,” a piece he titled “Crucifixion of Generations to Come.”
Sculptor Suprina Troche said she began using text in her work during the first Trump administration after becoming dismayed by the idea of “alternative truth.” One of those works, “Is There Only One Truth?,” features text made of detritus.
Another piece in the exhibition, “Thoughts & Prayers,” is a large-scale sculpture of a mourning woman covered in prayers from around the world. Troche said she spent a year creating the figure, first sculpting it, then covering it with plaster, wax, and tissue paper. She peeled away the outer layer, risking damage to the work, to create a hollow form that could be lit from within, suggesting fires caused by climate change.
“It’s a very sad piece,” she said.
Still, she added, being able to make it “was amazing.”
Phoenicia artist Christina Varga said she shifted away from oil painting after becoming a parent and turned to collage because she “wanted to work in a non-toxic way.”
After first working with paper, she began using plastic waste, drawn to the vivid colors of what she described as “beautiful, glittery plastic” around her. Raising children made her more aware of how much plastic modern life generates, she said.
Kids want plastic toys, Varga said, but she tells them, “this is going to choke a whale.”
Based on feedback from the Jane Street show, Varga said she is planning a children’s eco-art class and finds hope in teaching children who may, in turn, influence their parents.
Saugerties artist Christy Rupp, who has a background in sculpture, said her work is shaped by years of self-directed research into ocean life. She recreates the forms of krill, a type of plankton, using plastic waste.
Plankton cannot navigate on their own, she said, and “just go where the tides take them,” absorbing microplastic pollution in the process.
The problem, Rupp said, is not only plastic itself, but also the chemicals that make up roughly half its volume and give objects color, elasticity, and heat resistance, even though many are “in use for just a heartbeat but last forever.”
“I’ve always believed that the landscape of ecocide, although sad, is also a place of rebirth and opportunity for a restart,” she said.
“Matter Out of Place” is on view through May 8 at the Jane Street Art Center, 11 Jane St. in Saugerties. The gallery is open Thursdays through Sundays, from noon to 5 p.m. on Thursday and Sunday, and noon to 6 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays.
Margaret Tomlinson is a contributing writer. You can send her an email at reporting@theoverlooknews.com.