FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Please List
“Detritus Upcycled”
Curated by Vernita Nemec
September 3 – September 28, 2024
Reception Thursday September 5, 6-8pm
Closing reception, Saturday, September 28, 4-6pm
Annaliese Bischoff * Zoe Brown-Weissmann * Ellen Burnett * Lindsay-Ann Chilcott * Irene Christensen
James Ciosek * Pam Cooper * May DeViney * Katherine Earle * Jodie Fink * Bess French
Debra Friedkin * Rachel Green * Eddie Hall * Bernice Sokol Kramer * Sandra Lapage * Eric David Laxman
Mia Loia * Gail Meyers * Elizabeth Morisette * Vernita N’Cognita * Carol Paik * Yuko Uchida
Gale Rothstein * Sylvia Schwartz * Rebecca Tuck * Courtney Lee Weida * Larry Zdeb
Chelsea NY: Viridian Artists is pleased to present the exhibit “Detritus Upcycled" featuring the work of artists who make exciting fine art from trash. The heart of this exhibit is the message of the three R's: Reduce/Reuse/Recycle and especially "upcycling”. The exhibit opens Tuesday, September 3 and continues through Saturday, September 28 with an opening reception Thursday, September 5 and a closing reception Saturday, September 28, 4-6pm when some of the artists will be present to talk about their art and its relationship with the environment.
This exhibit, “Detritus Upcycled”, serves to enrich the dialogue between art and the lives of ordinary people because we all have too much trash. By focusing on recycling or "upcycling" as their method and source for creating, these artists have made their art-making serve as both an environmental message and creative inspiration. This exhibit reaches beyond the art world, serving as a message not only about art, but also about the environment. The art in this exhibit is not a solution, but it serves as a reminder that we must do something more than we are doing now to stop the proliferation of garbage & trash that is overtaking our environment. Plastic and paper are pervasive fillers of our landfills and our oceans with gyres of plastic detritus and now even cardboard boxes, so easily recyclable, are becoming an environmental issue.
Artists in this exhibit are opening a dialogue with viewers about the importance and usefulness of art as something beyond decoration. By seeing beauty in the discarded, these artists have been creatively addressing the problem of too much trash by using it to create fascinating and unique art before it was even known to be an environmental problem. Artists have been using found objects to make art for eons, but now it has become ostensibly a political act.
“Art from Detritus”, or art from trash, was first conceived and curated by Vernita Nemec in 1994 in Portland, Oregon during the annual conference of the National Recycling Coalition (NRC). Presented there in the lobby of a recycled Sears Roebuck building & the corporate headquarters for municipal waste & recycling, the exhibit has re-occurred with funding from the Kauffman Foundation, the Puffin Foundation and sponsorship by the NRC. The exhibit was presented in Pittsburgh at the Westinghouse headquarters, the Museum of Arts & Crafts and the AIA; in Kansas City MO at the Linda Hall Library of Science, Rockhurst College & the Writer's Place. Phoenix AZ, Turners Falls, MA and NYC have all been Detritus exhibition sites since those early years. In NYC, Detritus exhibits have occurred at the Henry Street Abrams Arts Center, Gallery 450, Synagogue for the Arts, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Farleigh Dickinson University, WAH (Williamsburgh Art Center) and many times at Viridian. You can see more information and images of past Detritus shows at www.ncognita.com.
Vernita Nemec, aka Vernita N'Cognita, the curator and creator of Art from Detritus, is a visual & performance artist and has been the director of Viridian Artists since 2000. Her complete biography can be seen in Wikipedia at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernita_Nemec.
We look forward to presenting this exciting exhibit of important art to you and hope to see you then.
For further information please contact
Vernita Nemec, Director or Jenny Belin, Assistant Director
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Viridian Artists Gallery or visit our website at viridianartists.com