Plastic touches every aspect of our lives. It’s in clothing, housewares, toys, medical devices, vehicles, and infrastructure. It coats our walls, transports our water, encases our food, fills our cavities, even prolongs our lives. Yet the word “plastic” is equated with cheapness, both in quality of construction and value. Why? How has a material that in only seventy years has replaced all traditional materials in every application earned the reputation for being worthless? Shouldn’t it be the opposite? Shouldn’t it be revered?
Though much of the environmentally themed work we see that deals with plastic is about trash and guilt, the work of Kalliopi Monoyios seeks to reach people by embracing the complexity of our relationship with the material and speaking openly about it. By treating it with devotion, like the precious resource it is, she points a finger at consumerism as the root of our pollution problems, while honoring a material that makes modern life efficient and comfortable. Monoyios collects, washes, folds, and sews food wrappers into quilts that could be handed down through generations as heirlooms. She folds plastic into thousands of interlocking modular origami pieces while meditating on her wish for a solution to the plastic pollution problem in the tradition of senbazuru (folding 1000 origami cranes for peace). Creating beauty from a workhorse material that society undervalues and treats as disposable is an act of devotion and hope. Only when we fully appreciate how integral it is to our lives and our livelihood can we begin to change our attitudes about its value.
The body of work in this exhibit expands on Monoyios’s themes of surprising and quirky uses of plastic, all with the goal of inviting people to think deeper about their own relationships with the material. Featuring a combination of framed works, free-standing sculptures, large quilts, and installation, the exhibit combines single-use plastic food wrappers, PTFE dental floss, silicone contact lenses, and other surprising plastics (spoiler alert: chewing gum is plastic!) as fine art media. A small selection of familiar mass-produced items is also included in the exhibit in order to reveal the incredible versatility of this wonder material.