I found it a little uneasy to be able to color-adjust the trash in the debris art pieces that Pamela Longobaldi has set up at the Baker Museum in Naples.
When the exhibition opens on Saturday (see information box for details), ecologically exciting works such as “One World Ocean” set up last Friday showcase debris from around the world. increase. They were all found on the beach, and Lombardi found enough trash to match the tones and almost exact colors.
Faded toothbrushes, scraps of railings, lumps of tabletop laminate, tableware, and toy parts in turquoise and blue shades fit into the “map” of the wall. It defines the world as the center of life by water, not by continents.
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It’s not a new perspective, Longo Baldi said he pinned to a part that would have begun to resemble our home planet. The Earth is described as a great sea, and our continent goes back at least to the point where Roman emperor Agrippa requested the map on which her installation was based.
Her art analyzes the “life” of various oceans
In Longo Baldi’s work, the sea is almost constant. A skillful blend of her protectionism and her artistic talent, Georgia State University’s art professor won the $ 50,000 Hudgens Award in 2013. ..
“Ocean Gleaning” will showcase some of her most traveled works, from “One World Ocean” to “Consumption Web for Monaco (Self-Proclaiming Material Snare)” (2011).
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One of her more familiar “Swerve” (2019) is a plump dual edge wave in the shape of ribbons, ladders, rods, crescents, discs and more. Again, I swear it’s all beach trash and has a black skeletal system when viewed from a distance, but Longo Baldi swear that each part he uses before starting work on the studio floor. Easy to clean.
“It’s really important to me that it looks like that,” she said. “I want them to be like them.” There is an ecological truth to be removed: turquoise toothbrushes shed that degrading plastic.
“This can float in the air,” she said, touching the table with a spray of turquoise dust. Or, she said, it can be carried by the sea to be ingested by fish, and often by humans. “It’s not just in their stomachs. It’s embedded in their skin.”
If other works mention the media in which they were created, Longo Baldi lists the countries in which her debris came. She said people who are proud of their clean beaches are often surprised to find out what the local trash is on their beaches.
“It’s everywhere, it’s all of us,” she said of the plastic issue. As such, her wall work, even whimsically, exudes a strong composition and deliberate color, but underneath it is a premonition. We are junking the planet and poisoning the creatures on it with all of these.
The point: Stealing art supplies from Longo Baldi is the best thing you can do in this world.
Life jacket becomes a national symbol
Visitors will want to take a closer look at the fan-shaped brigade with a small flag and the large flag brigade on the west wall that is part of her exhibition. All fabrics come from life jackets. They were worn by people fleeing Syria and other countries that landed or were washed away on the Greek island of Lesvos, which is geographically closest to Africa and the Middle East.
Arrivals stripped off their jackets and the rest of the equipment was overtaking the beach where about 450,000 refugees and migrants arrived from just February and December 1st of this year. (In contrast, Lesbos has only 85,000 residents.)
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To clean the beach, islanders collect life jackets and transport them to the Life Jacket Mountain storage area. When Longo Baldi went to see it, she also saw a rubber raft in the mountains, whose sides were cut by rescuers to prevent smugglers from reusing them. ..
Longo Baldi hired someone with a sewing machine to tear up the abandoned vest and create a large flag.
“The idea behind these was that they were the flag of this new refugee country from all over the world and now there is no place,” she said.
She admitted that the visit to Life Jacket Mountain was jarring.
“I found so many pool floats, even small hydrofoils. They sent the kids with something just for the pool and sent them in this roaring night sea,” she said. I remembered.
“And a fake life jacket. It was puffy because there was a vest filled only with newspapers and empty crumpled plastic bags, but it will sink soon,” she said.
“It was almost like a traumatic place,” she said, “I knew what those life jackets were carrying.
Harriet Howard Heights House covers the arts and entertainment of Naples Daily News / naplesnews.com. Please contact her at 239-213-6091.
Install tiny little wall art
To recreate the art of her beach debris walls in places like the Baker Museum, artist Pamela Longobardi has a plastic vinyl template that is placed on top of her work when she creates it. ..
Each item is marked on the fly and given an ID. Longo Baldi uses so many pieces — there are 700 in her “World Ocean” — she runs out of numbers that fit in that small part and begins to multiply the alphabet. If it sounds impossible to run out of numbers, it’s not impossible to run out of space for them.
“You can’t fit three numbers in something like this,” she explained, lifting a piece of jagged plastic that wasn’t more than an inch long. Each piece also has two or more mounting pins that can be fixed to the wall.
Her Baker Museum signature work is made from some of the items she and her volunteers have collected on the beaches of Naples. Volunteers for beach cleanup on September 18 submitted a bag of items that were washed or ignored with a clam pass.
How long does it take to set up an exhibition?
“We have 10 days, so it’s almost not enough,” Longo Baldi said, looking at the items scattered on the tabletop of “One World Ocean,” even with four or five crew members involved.
If you go
“Gleaning”
what: Debriart of Pamela Longobardi, an artist and professor of art at Georgia State University in Atlanta, who won the 2013 Hagens Award.
when: From Saturday, December 18th to July 24th, Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 4pm, and Sunday from noon to 4pm. Closed on December 25th and January 1st
Where: Baker Museum, 5833 Pelican Babel Bird, Naples
Admission fee: $ 10; Full-time student with student ID or active duty with ID, $ 5. SNAP EBT card entry, $ 1 (see website for details).Free admission to the museum during Art After Hour — Next is December 29th, 6 pm-9pm
Something else: The artist will talk about her art at the Baker Museum’s signature space at 2:00 pm on January 27th. $ 15 ticket is on artisnaples.org
Something important: Artis-Naples strictly adheres to certain COVID protocols. A list of entry requirements can be found on the home page of that website.It also limits the size of the bag to 14 x 6 x 4 inches
