Abnormal Growth, Artists Riff on Technology, Disposability, and Indestructible Waste

Newspaper Article, Journalist: Gregory Beatty

The Prairie Dog, Regina, SK

December 6, 2007 - December 16, 2007

"I just want to say one word to you.  Just one word... Plastics.  There's a great future in plastics."

- The Graduate, 1967.

Upon attending the opening of Abnormal Growth at the Sherwood Village Branch Gallery on November 24, an exhibition of sculptural works by Griffith Aaron Baker, Twyla Exner, and Tricia Middleton curated by the Dunlop's Amanda Cachia, I couldn't help but think of the above quote from the classic counter-culture flick about a disaffected college graduate named Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) who, while trying to decide what he wants to do with his life, is seduced by and embarks on a short affair with the wife (Anne Bancroft)

of his father's business partner.

In the movie, the advice Benjamin receives from another of his father's business associates to consider a career in plastics is rife with metaphorical significance.  Initially regarded as a miracle substance that by virtue of its relative abundance and versatility on comparison with natural materials like wood, stone, brass silk, and rubber would usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity, plastic, by 1967, had come to be seen as a symbol of all that was wrong with America -- sleek, colourful, and infinitely malleable, sure, but lacking substance, tactility, and soul.

Ironically, while the scene in The Graduate was intended as a slag against plastic, it actually had the opposite effect, boosting the stock of companies in the industry and legitimizing the sector as a viable career path for budding business executives and scientific researchers alike.

Thanks to The Graduate (and ignorance, and unsustainable consumption, and a dysfunctional economy), in 2001 the average American used an estimated 223 pounds of plastic, with that figure expected to rise to 326 pounds by 2010.  A recent Los Angeles Times article (from which I cribbed those stats) discussed the growing problem of plastic as a pollutant in the worlds oceans.

Before I go any further, I'd like to emphasise that plastic isn't the sole subject matter of Abnormal Growth.  Yes, there is a lot of the material on display in the various sculptures and installations.  But that's simply one facet of a broader issue that Cachia and the three artists are intent on exploring here -- namely, how our growing dependence on technology is impacting on environmental sustainability.

"Issues of environmental damage have always interested me as a curator," said Cachia at the opening.  "All three artists are obviously very different.  But there's strong links between them.  They work with recycled material.  They're very passionate about consumer waste, and what happens to an object after we buy it."

For Baker, who obtained his BFA at the University of Regina in 2004 and is now studying for his MFA at Concordia University in Montreal, bottled water is a particular bugaboo.  For several years now, he's been  collecting discarded plastic bottle caps and using them to construct giant versions of popular brands of bottled water and, more recently, soft drinks.  So what is it about the industry that bothers him?

To begin with, most urban residents -- in the developed world anyway -- already have access to a safe supply of drinking water.  But through skilful marketing preying on consumer worries about the purity if tap water and extolling the virtues of their product as a status symbol, companies like Evian, Aquafina and Perrier have carved a significant -- and growing --- niche for themselves.

In Evian Bottle, Baker tackles the challenge this consumer trend presents to the environment.  Three meters tall and composed of over 13,000 bottle caps, the sculpture is an exact replica of an Evian bottle save for one small detail: the company name is spelled backwards, and thus reads "naive".

To Baker, who spoke at the opening, consumers are naive to pay a premium price for bottled water which scientific studies reveal is virtually indistinguishable from ordinary tap water.  Indeed, concern has recently been expressed about phthalates, a chemical that is added to plastic to make it supple, leeching into the bottled water.  In laboratory tests, phthalates have been linked to birth defect and liver cancer.

Also problematic for Baker is the amount of waste that the industry generates.  While the bottles themselves are made of type one plastic and are recyclable, the caps are made of type five plastic and aren't.  Sure, they're tiny.  But when you consider that millions of bottled drinks are sold each day, it quickly adds up.

Once discarded, these caps, as the Times article tragically revealed, are often washed out to sea where, along with tons of other waste plastic ranging from cigarette lighters and toothbrushes to toy soldiers and all manner of cargo lost from ships at sea, they are pushed by ocean currents, called gyres, into massive patches of floating debris that create dead zones and poison marine animals on the periphery who mistake the plastic its for food.

Even is they're disposed of properly, the caps become another stream of non biodegradable waste clogging our landfills.  It's that reality that Baker, in collaboration with Exner, addresses in Consumed -- a wall mounted bottle cap mural which depicts a truck dumping tons of bottle caps in a landfill, where they morph into a model of the molecular structure for type 5 plastic.  Beneath the mural is the pseudo corporate slogan admonishment: materials that last, objects that fail.

The irony of this industrial practice, in which goods that are intended to be used once and then thrown away are made of a material that, once disposed of, will endure for millennia, is explored more fully by Exner in her solo work.  Like Baker, she's a University of Regina grad who's also currently enrolled in Concordia's MFA program.  Living in Montreal, where garbage pick-up is done largely from the street, she's reminded constantly of how wasteful we, as a society are.

Particularity troubling for Exner is the amount of electronic trash we produce.  While not disposable per se, relentless innovation in terms of improved performance and tweaks in style quickly render computers, monitors, MP3 players and other digital devices functionally obsolete.  When she spots something in the garbage she grabs it and cannibalizes it for her art.  Internal wires, for instance are employed as weaving material in place of the grasses, roots and tree bark that weavers traditionally use.

In System, she explores logistical and aesthetic similarities between the nervous and circulatory systems of plants and animals and non-organic electrical systems in computers.  Similarly, in Invasion, she presents a desktop computer and printer seemingly gone to seed, with woven wire growths sprouting fungus and pod-like forms from various cracks and crevices.

Like Baker and Exner, Middleton also makes use of recycled materials in her sculptures.  A 2005 graduate  of Concordia's MFA program, she presents two works here: Help! Final Home and Ether Frolics that critique the sustainability of domestic living arrangements in North American society, where our largely non-communal mindset requires a heavy expenditure of resources to build, furnish and maintain the dwellings which we inhabit.

In Ether Frolics, she showcases a line of garden furniture like a fountain, bird bath and bench that, consistent with their hand made origin , are somewhat rudimentary looking, but nonetheless possess a frothy ornateness suggestive of self-indulgent excess.  Help! Final Home, meanwhile, consists of a hand-built structure with wooden floorboards which contains a steep staircase.  At the top, Middleton's installed a small LCD panel which displays video of her in her Montreal apartment calling plaintively for help.

Can you hear her?