September 18 - November 27, 2021

From Upsurge The Environmental Show at the PEG Center for Art and Activism in Newburyport, MA…

storefront art projects in Watertown presents: Upsurge, too

Lyrical hanging assemblages of ocean debris, a giant sea creature made of brown single–use plastic grocery bags; landscapes collaged from street litter; a mixed media image of a tsunami towering over a nuke plant; and hand-dyed woven panels of a sinking house are all part of Upsurge, too. An abbreviated version of Upsurge at PEG Center for Art and Activism in Newburyport, Upsurge, too features five regional artists doing multimedia work about climate change and impermanence, loss, beauty, and the harm humans are causing to our world.

Ruth Brownstein’s mixed media works on paper depict a tsunami about to crash over a nuclear plant and a melting glacier. She says her work is a “contemplation and an exercise in illuminating the global climate crisis . . . We must stretch ourselves emotionally and intellectually so we can feel enough . . . to care about those who suffer because of this.” Her work makes us worry and her vision of empathy is clear.

These Anne Cummings collages hung in Bernie Sanders’s Washington office during his presidential campaign. Anne creates images of nature and landscape from newspapers, candy wrappers, and roadside litter gathered throughout her home state of Vermont.  She reuses, recycles and repurposes post-consumer waste to reduce its impact on the environment and to educate viewers about their part in the damage we inflict on the earth.

Sarah Haskell from York, Maine says,  “The Buddhist concept of impermanence is at the core of my work.”  She explores the parallels of impermanence between her organic textile materials and our human bodies. She weaves and hand stitches a drowning house and a falling person in her hand-dyed linen series “Sinking House” and “Unhinged.”  She writes, “Thread upon thread I seek to make visible the known and unknown, the concrete and the mysterious... to generate more questions and creative possibilities.”

Rebecca McGee Tuck is a  fiber artist, sculptor, and collector of lost objects. She writes, “My work is inspired by the bits and fragments of land and sea debris that I gather. Every object that I pick up has energy like an emotional artifact, containing a relation to an action, a person or an intriguing unknown. The depth and textures that are built up through sculptural experiments, become a layered narrative. On the surface, the objects within may only be unwanted debris, but the sculptural outcome that is composed is a multilayered storyline of what was left behind.” They are treasures and they are made from ocean trash.

Michelle Lougee transforms single use plastic into meticulously crafted otherworldly sculpture. Bringing attention to discarded plastic remnants of human presence in nature, particularly life sustaining floating microcosms being choked out by plastic waste, she crochets single use plastic into sculptural representations of marine phytoplankton. Her work is at once macro and micro. It beckons one to consider the scale of plastic pollution while forcing contemplation of usually unseen microscopic creatures essential to the food chain. People across the globe produce over 300 million tons of plastic a year. Half of this plastic is used only once and then heads for the world’s oceans.