BRATTLEBORO — The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) will present an online panel of internationally known artists whose work focuses on ocean pollution on Thursday, Feb. 18, at 7 p.m.
Moderator and artist Andy Yoder will lead Alejandro Durán, Pam Longobardi, and Aurora Robson in a discussion of their work and the ways they draw inspiration from the crisis happening in our oceans, particularly around plastic trash.
Durán collects trash on the Caribbean coast of Mexico and transforms it through “Washed Up: Transforming a Trashed Landscape,” an ongoing environmental installation and photography project.
Images from the project have been published in National Geographic, Time, and The Huffington Post as well as the books Art & Ecology Now, Unexpected Art, and PhotoViz: Visualizing Information Through Photography.
Longobardi founded the Drifters Project, a global collaborative entity that has removed tens of thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and resituated it in social space. Longobardi has been featured in National Geographic, in Sierra, and in exhibitions in galleries, museums, and public spaces around the world.
Robson is a multimedia artist known predominantly for her meditative work intercepting the plastic waste stream. She is the founding artist of Project Vortex, an international collective of artists, designers, and architects who work in innovative ways with plastic debris.
Yoder's work has been exhibited at the International Print Center New York, the Saatchi Gallery, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Reykjavik Art Museum. He has been commissioned to create work for numerous public installations, including the Columbus Museum of Art, the ESPN Zone in New York, and Hilltop Montessori School in Brattleboro.
On view at BMAC through Saturday, March 6, Yoder's installation “Overboard” was inspired by an incident in which five shipping containers containing 61,820 Nike sneakers were lost at sea.
Introduced in the same year as the spill, the iconic sneaker became the template for Yoder's showroom of 240 Air Jordan 5 replicas, each one made from recycled packaging or promotional materials.