Photo Credit: AnteMag
Meredith recently had her work featured in Wayfarer Gallery’s Anthropocene Blues Exhibit curated by Jane Ursula Harris. Here is an excerpt from her press release about the exhibit:
“While a quick search on Google reveals several sources for the origins of the phrase Anthropocene Blues, this exhibition takes its name and inspiration from an eponymous Anne Waldman poem of 2012. With an almost quaint ring to it, the term’s reference to our growing social anxiety over the impending death of nature is nonetheless gravely real. Waldman, one of the last great living Beat poets, reminds us of that in her poem, its opening stanza reading like an elegy:
sound de-territorializes weather and my love clings to you sings to you in the “new weathers” within a tragedy of the Anthropocene
In organizing the Wayfarers exhibition around this elegiac theme, I hope to also sound a clarion call, echoing Waldman’s impetus for her poem, which she describes as “alarm at the continuing prevalence of climate change ignorance and the thrust of recent political events.” The following descriptions offer a way to consider the exhibition’s individual works in this context….
Meredith Starr’s Plastic Pool/ Look At What We’ve Done, 2019, is a circular installation of shard-like shapes cut from plastic bags (shown here in a smaller, modified version) that underscore and transform its base materials. The plastic bags are sourced from packaging that the artist has personally accumulated, and as a “commentary on our throwaway culture” confront us with the environmental toll our need for convenience incurs. While the title may invoke images of backyard pool parties, and suburban vernacular, the specter of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, with its giant islands of floating plastic in the Pacific Ocean, also comes to mind.”
And thank you to Ante Mag for great coverage about the exhibit! PRESS
“Meredith Starr’s almost obsessively crowded installation Plastic Pools/Look At What We’ve Done suggests, in miniature, the overwhelming amount of plastic that we have hoarded and discarded through our rampant consumerist attitudes.”
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