The Stuff of a Sustainable Future

SYRACUSE, New York — On trash days in his house of Utica, New York, sculptor and set up artist Marc-Anthony Polizzi hops into his 15-year-old pickup truck and goes scavenging. He has guidelines about what supplies he picks out of roadside junk piles: nothing that may be donated, nothing absorbent, nothing that one other scavenger might flip into money. The leftovers — wonky shelving, damaged furnishings, outdated window blinds, a single ski boot — change into the constructing blocks of brightly hued, site-specific artwork installations that function regional portraits and touch upon up to date client tradition’s emphasis on the disposable.

At the moment on view on the Everson Museum of Artwork, Overextended is Polizzi’s newest assertion in and on stuff. The intense orange set up (a shade impressed by the solar as seen via the Canadian wildfire smoke that billowed into Upstate New York this previous summer time) consists of three segments. A broad geometric form painted on the wall blends a lightning bolt and a thought bubble. It emerges beside a kitschy, life-sized canine sculpture, wraps round two partitions, and explodes on the gallery’s again wall in a visible cacophony of discarded middle-class materiality, balanced in a precarious-looking pile atop two two-by-fours that stretch barely past the width of the gallery house. 

Your entire assemblage appears to be upheld by a automotive jack, however the jack is only for present. The presence of this single connecting level to the ground produces the anxiety-inducing phantasm that the set up might collapse at any second, burying viewers in low cost, mass-produced paraphernalia. It’s an apt metaphor for central New York State, an evolving Rust Belt area that was traditionally economically supported by transportation of fabric items by way of the Erie Canal.

Whereas the set up might evoke environmental disasters just like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a nostalgic attraction inheres in a number of the collected stuff. Prominently positioned pinwheels, a part of a Playskool Playhouse, and molded plastic toys communicate to childhood and goal to have interaction younger viewers, hopefully inspiring discussions and actions for a sustainable future.

Marc-Anthony Polizzi: Overextended continues on the Everson Museum of Artwork (401 Harrison St, Syracuse, New York) via September 24. This exhibition is a part of the continued Central New York Artist Initiative, which spotlights regional creatives, and was organized by the museum.