MEMBER SPOTLIGHT
October 17, 2022
This week we recognize Pam Longobardi, and her twenty plus year practice focused on plastic pollution.
"I engage citizens in active processes of cleaning ascare: action as antidote to experience the transformative connective shift that occurs. Plastic is the geologic marker of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, or most poignantly, Eremocene, the ‘Age of Loneliness’(E.O.Wilson). Plastic production, dissemination and zombie afterlife contributes to Earth’s present 6th Mass Extinction. In addition to gallery/museum installations, I do site-work, involving forms of distance messaging such as mirror communication, Semaphore, and S.O.S. messages shot by drone, as performative pieces, projecting messages of attention. This, along with my studio-based painting practice involving phenomenology and chemistry, makes up the whole of my work." click images for more info
"Plastic objects are the cultural archeology of our time. These objects I see as a portrait of global late-capitalist consumer society, mirroring our desires, wishes, hubris and ingenuity. These are objects with unintended consequences that become transformed as they leave the quotidian world and collide with nature to be transformed, transported and regurgitated out of the shifting oceans. The ocean is communicating with us through the materials of our own making. The plastic elements initially seem attractive and innocuous, like toys, some with an eerie familiarity and some totally alien. At first, the plastic seems innocent and fun, but it is not. It is dangerous. We are remaking the world in plastic."
"In keeping with the movement of drift of these material artifacts, I prefer using them in a transitiveform as installation. All of the work can be dismantled, reconfigured but nearly impossibly recycled. The objects are presented as specimens on steel pins or wired together to form larger structures. I am interested in the collision between nature and global consumer culture. Ocean plastic is a material that can unleash unpredictable dynamics. As a product of culture that exhibits visibly the attempts of nature to reabsorb and regurgitate this invader, ocean plastic has profound stories to tell."
In 2013, Longobardi created a site-specific installation for a special project of the Venice cultural association Ministero di Beni Culturali (MiBAC), and the Ministry of Culture of Rome, for the 55th Venice Biennale on the Island of San Francesco del Deserto in the Venetian Lagoon; a work made from plastic water bottles, crystals and a mirrored satellite dish that signaled an apology to St. Francis across the lagoon to the island of Burano (below).
Pam Longobardi lives and works in Atlanta as Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Art at Georgia State University. Her Drifters Project, which began in 2006 after encountering mountainous piles of plastic on remote Hawaiian beaches, is ongoing,following the world ocean currents. With the Drifters Project, she collects, documents and transforms oceanic plastic into installations, public art and photography. The work provides a visual statement about the engine of global consumption, the vast amounts of plastic objects’ impact on the world’s most remote places and its’ creatures, framed within a conversation about globalism and conservation. She has exhibited across the US and in Greece, Monaco, Germany, Finland, Slovakia, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Costa Rica and Poland. Longobardi participated in the 2013 GYRE expedition to remote coastal areas of Alaska and created project-specific large-scale works for exhibition at the Anchorage Museum February 2014 that traveled nationwide to five US museums. She was featured in a National Geographic film on the GYRE expedition and her Drifters Project was featured in National Geographic magazine. Longbardi is Oceanic Society’s Artist-In-Nature.
Featured Images (top to bottom): ©Pam Longobardi, Drifters Objects; ForensicLab, Ocean Gleaning, solo exhibition at Baker Museum, Florida, 2022; Baker Museum, back room, Laocoon Threnodfy Bounty Pilfered, 2022; Reflecting Web of the Anthropocene (An Apology to Saint Francis), 2013, Venice, Italy; below, portrait of the artist.
