Anna Gustafson
Artist enshrouds single-use plastics and small appliances to grieve ecological losses due to unbridled consumerism.
Anna Gustafson, "Object Lessons," 2017-ongoing
installation view at Esker Foundation, Calgary (photo by John Dean)
Sheathing objects in white fabric evokes a range of metaphorical impulses. To hide, to erase and to protect are a few that immediately come to mind.
But when the objects thus enshrouded are some of the domestic sphere’s most mundane and disposable – plastic milk jugs, kitchen appliances or garden tools – they become a cunningly understated critique of consumerism.
Artist Anna Gustafson, who lives on Salt Spring Island off the British Columbia coast, has put much of her energy into this project over the last five years, carefully hand-stitching linen casings from salvaged fabric, including sheets, table cloths and even dish towels.
She's reluctant to discuss how many objects she’s enshrouded with this obsessive labour – but admits to some 800 remote controls, a quarter of which are on display until April 10 as part of her installation, Object Lessons, in the external window case at the Esker Foundation in Calgary.
Anna Gustafson, "Object Lessons," 2017-ongoing
installation view at Esker Foundation, Calgary (photo by John Dean)
The installation also includes leaf blowers that float silently like model spacecraft. Gustafson has chosen objects linked symbolically to systems of power and control – both of nature and communications.
The installation offers an understated, if alien, beauty. Each shrouded object is reduced to its essential form, stripped of identity, brand and any appeal to shoppers. Her objects resemble basic illustrations showing how to portray form in how-to-draw books.
Yet there’s also a subtle yet enticing play between obscuring form and revealing it – dials and switches, for instance, often play peekaboo through the cloth.
It took Gustafson a while to understand the project is essentially about grief and her process mimics the way diverse cultures wash and wrap their dead for burial. In this light, the work becomes a way to lament the environmental cost of some of our favourite creature comforts.
“As we deplete the earth’s resources to manufacture and power consumer products, we destroy ecosystems,” Gustafson says in her artist statement. “When such objects are deemed obsolete, these pieces of our contemporary material culture are consigned to landfills and further continue the sequence of ecological devastation.”
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Anna Gustafson, “Ghost Nets,” 2015-ongoing
linen, cotton twine, chain and metal hardware and discarded single-use plastic containers, installation view (photo by Sophia Burke)
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Anna Gustafson, “Ghost Nets,” 2015-ongoing
linen, cotton twine, chain and metal hardware and discarded single-use plastic containers, installation view (photo by Sophia Burke)
Gustafson is also participating in a group show, Castaways: Art From the Material World, on view until June 5 at the Bateman Foundation in Victoria.
Here, she shows Ghost Nets, an installation of fishing nets filled with disposable plastic containers – the sort of stuff that floats en masse in the world’s oceans, creating huge waterborne islands of plastic trash.
The plastics eventually break into small chunks that are eaten by fish, sea birds and marine mammals, clogging their digestive systems and causing them to die from starvation. ■
Anna Gustafson: Object Lessons is on view in the external window at the Esker Foundation in Calgary from Feb. 3 to April 19, 2020. Castaways: Art from the Material World is on view at the Bateman Foundation in Victoria from March 6 to June 5, 2020.
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