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Strange Gardens

October 22, 2021 By meerasub Leave a Comment

By Alicja Wróblewska

It was a pleasure to explore Alicja Wróblewska’s art for the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. Here’s how “Strange Gardens: An Effervescent Vision of Plastic’s Impact on the Ocean” begins…

What is beauty for? What is its source? Polish artist Alicja Wróblewska thinks about such things as she fashions fanciful sculptures, snaps photographs, and creates collages both analog and digital to explore the impact of plastics on ocean health. With a background in political science and commercial photography, Wróblewska lives in the tense space between the consumer societies we inhabit and the wreckage they leave behind.

She’s slipped away from work into the sunlight of a Warsaw park to speak to me, her long brown hair lifting in the wind as she walks with her phone, seeking…

Read the rest here.

Filed Under: Anthropocene, climate change, journalism, photography, plastics Tagged With: Art, climate change, ocean, ocean acidification, plastics, pollution, Virginia Quarterly Review

The Nature of Plastics

March 5, 2021 By meerasub Leave a Comment

 

Artwork: Steve McPherson

 

EARLY IN 2004, a buoy was released into the waters off Argentina. Half of the buoy was dark and the other light, like a planet in relief. The buoy sailed east, accompanied by the vastness of the ocean and all the life it contains, the long-lived great humpback whales with their complex songs that carry for miles, and the short-lived Argentine shortfin squid. Along the way, many thousands of minuscule creatures were colonizing this new surface, which had appeared like a life raft in the open waters of the South Atlantic.

The researchers who’d dropped the buoy followed its movement in hopes of learning more about ocean currents than generations of science and sailing history had revealed. They watched the buoy float into the wide-open ocean between South America and Africa, those twin coastlines that struck me, as I gazed at them on the pull-down map in first grade, as two puzzle pieces that once linked. They surveilled its movements by GPS. Eighteen months later, the signal ceased. Silence from the satellites.

The buoy continued along the currents of the South Atlantic, free from surveillance, sheltered and shocked by sun and clouds and storms overhead. It was likely molded out of a thermoplastic polymer called acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS, which, like most plastics, was crafted from the extracted remains of long-ago life-forms. ABS was engineered in the lab to endure—rigid, resilient, capable of withstanding all that being let loose at sea may foist upon it.

All plastic begins in a factory. That much we know. But where it goes next remains poorly understood. Only 1 percent of the plastic released into the marine environment is accounted for, found on the surface and in the intestines of aquatic animals. The rest is a little harder to measure. Some presumably washes back ashore. An untold amount settles, sunk by the weight of its new passengers. (One study found four times more plastic fibers in the sediment of the deep-sea floor than on the surface of the ocean.)

And some, like the buoy, just keeps drifting along.

***

I have spent thirty years fixated on environmental issues, spawned during my own oceanic migration in the fall of 1989….

Read the rest at Orion Magazine.

Filed Under: Anthropocene, climate change, journalism, Orion Tagged With: anthropocene, Art, cape cod, lego, ocean, Orion, plastics, sea

Anger & Angels: Artist Edith Vonnegut Responds to Trump

December 19, 2020 By meerasub Leave a Comment

After President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, artist Edith Vonnegut was outraged. Her response? She embarked on a creative frenzy of artistic works, one a day, for the first 100 days (except on the days that the new president was playing golf), with a few pranks along the way.

Meanwhile, I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, taking a class in short docs with Vivek Bald. Thanks to Edie for letting me follow her around, filming, learning as I went along.

Here’s her story.

Filed Under: dissent, Knight Science Journalism, video Tagged With: Art, cape cod, Edith Vonnegut, Knight Science Journalism, Trump

preserve what’s left

December 20, 2019 By meerasub Leave a Comment

Photos by Meera Subramanian

Lord God, it’s good to be home. The sky over Cape Cod is slack and grey, coughing up sleety rain that crunches and slides underfoot, but still there is a surge of delight, leaving the comfortable wood fire after wrapping too many gifts for too many Christmas revelers and heading out to meet Edie Vonnegut at the underpass (underpants! I think every single time I pass under it…and giggle). I was responding to her text:

I need a turpentine helper. Hold my ladder? 20 minutes max. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: just another day Tagged With: Art, cape cod, Edie Vonnegut, mural

shutdown in southeast asia

February 13, 2014 By meerasub

2014.01.31-103

Last month I stepped out of India for a short bit, traveling to Bangkok and Siem Riep for a belated holiday break. On my last days in Thailand, the Bangkok Shutdown, with a power off icon as its symbol, took over parts of the city. I, meanwhile, had a more private shutdown, ignored politics, and sat on the banks of the Pravetburirom Canal, sketching and becoming entranced with the silent exchanges I had with the man/woman across the water. Every once in a while he/she would wave happily and I would wave happily back. And every day, as the sunset painted the sky, it was time for he/she to cuddle the cat. Next door, long bamboo poles held a wide fishing net that the family would drop into the lazy canal and periodically check for catch. A small fish, maybe two, were the slim harvest.

The protests continue, a month later, and no one much is paying attention, but journalist Richard Barrow is still madly tweeting about the happenings, and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Filed Under: just another day, travels Tagged With: Art, Bangkok, travels

X marks the spot

December 15, 2008 By Meera 1 Comment

img_1942
Click on image for slide show.

There was a great egret, three feet tall if it was an inch, standing in the middle of Flood Street. Before Hurricane Katrina surged the city, there were once rows of houses instead of the weedy wild fields that now fill the expanses between the asphalt. The tall bird stood, considering, and flocks of starlings chattered in their watery language from the branches of the thick oaks that remained standing, battered but alive, nearby. I was in the Lower Ninth Ward, seeing, finally, what had happened to the city of New Orleans.

I lived there in the Big Easy once, when I was an eighteen-year-old kid trying out architecture school before leaving the school and the place in search of something and somewhere else. Then, as now, it struck me as a city from some other time, some other country. Certainly not America. The architecture, intricate and rotting; the food, heavy and complex, distending the belly; the air, wet and erotic; the divide between tourists and those who lived there — the number a fraction of what it once was — a chasm that had grown in some ways and shrunk in others. Everyone we met was kind, generous, some fierce pride about survival uniting them in defeat and resilience both.

The Prospect.1 New Orleans (P.1), apparently the largest biennial of contemporary art ever organized in the country, was taking place throughout the city, at established art museums as well as warehouses that had been transformed into museums, rough with plywood floors and alive with music and sound. There was art at the city parks and universities and Ideal Auto Repair. Outdoor installations included the frame of a woman’s house who had enough money to rebuild, until the contractor ran off with her money, leaving her nothing. Shuttle buses took us out, farther and farther from the screaming sameness of Bourbon Street – to St. Claude and then the Lower Ninth Ward, a place that no one had heard of before August 29, 2005. Rain fell from a slate sky as we passed houses still boarded up and silent. Half of the houses I saw  were still marked with the large X — spray-painted signs that rescue and recovery teams who inspected houses, one by one but much too late, left to mark their passage. A date, the agency acronym,  a marking of what they found – the number of dead.

Other houses were freshly painted. Life resumed.

It was the second thing I learned about New Orleans before I went there for school, (the first was that there were as many bars as churches, and a lot of both). But the second thing I learned was that parts of the Crescent City lie as much as 18 feet below sea level. It’s an impossible city. They rebuild, slowly, but the levees are still weak and more storms likely. I was reminded of my visit to a relief camp set up on the shores of south India after the tsunami. Another storm will come, someday, but, really, where else are the fisherman and their families who live in these seaside villages to go? In New Orleans, most of the people don’t live off the sea, but they do live below it. I looked at the length of the levee where a rogue barge struck during Katrina, causing or accelerating the breach that resulted in the worst of the damage. The rebuilt wall looks like an eight-foot concrete barrier. It looks insignificant. Unsubstantial. It is not angled, to help lean its slight frame against the wall of water that lies beyond.

More art stood there among the waist-high grass, an extension ladder stretching up to a suspended window frame thirty feet above, defying gravity; metal letters as tall as large child, spelled out in a circle, “HAPPILY EVER AFTER.” Mostly it was wide open space, a place for the birds that have wings to lift them out if needed, along with a few structures, widely spaces. Two trailers parked next to a double grave. The house of Common Ground Relief. A half dozen Make It Right eco-houses like splashes of child’s paint.

But much of the city is as I remembered it from twenty years ago. The stuffed artichoke from Frankie and Johnny’s. The swill at Cooter Brown’s. The smell of iron from the brakes of the St. Charles streetcar, acrid on the tongue. The rain that falls, heavy, lingering in the grand oaks whose branches reach back to the ground, as though they, too, are lazy from the heat.

Go. Remember this place that shouldn’t be there, but is. I recommend the Avenue Garden Hotel, a cozy place right on St. Charles, that is struggling to keep it together as the economy hits the city like yet another storm. Go and listen to the music, transcendent in the night.

See more photos on Flickr

Jazz at the Spotted Cat
Jazz at the Spotted Cat

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Art, New Orleans

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