Duke Riley’s DEATH TO THE LIVING, Long Live Trash, on display in the Brooklyn Museum, is the culmination of years of collecting, researching, and creating. The exhibition consists of a collection of scrimshaws, sailor’s valentines, fishing lures, and more. Each of these “maritime crafts” are reinterpreted by Riley, where he uses marine waste he has collected from Northeastern beaches, to show the devastating effects of large industry and corporations on the environment, and specifically our oceans. The scrimshaw is now plastic bottles and other waste, instead of bones. The sailor’s valentines are now made out of found plastics instead of shells.
The display of this show is pretty near perfect. It does nothing to distract from the work he is displaying, only adds to it. They used the existing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jan Martense Schenck and Nicholas Schenck Houses, and displayed pieces of his artistic process and final pieces alongside the museum's existing collection of scrimshaw. This display excellently shows the difference between then and now, and the environmental injustices happening in the world.
This, to me, is one of the most successful uses of waste in art to actually show the extent of the issue being discussed. Because of the way that Riley uses traditional crafts and methods of making, but with different found materials, he is able to successfully show the change in the contents of our oceans because of this. We are no longer only finding shells and bones, but trash.
- Stella
I enjoy how you discuss the scrimshaws and the sailor's valentines and give more detail into them and their history. Especially the scrimshaws being a traditional sailor craft made out of bone as I did not know this before. I also enjoyed the house, mostly because it was funny seeing a 17th century house with glitter nail polish and tampon applicators in it.
ReplyDeleteI really appreciate you talking about how the space which this show is in. The room that work is displayed in, and how the artist/curator works with that space can 100% be a make or break point with the work.To use pieces that already live in the Brooklyn museum was really nice to see, as it brings the conversation of the show outside of the room (and hopefully the museum). I agree with you, that this show was able to perfectly capture the global issue of waste through repurposing it into art, and how at a certain point trash will be what we end up seeing the most compared to anything else.
ReplyDeleteit was a good move to bring up both the history of the materials used in this exhibition-the scrimshaws and valentines- as well as the general history of using waste in art to invoke environmental awareness. I would put any descriptions of the "maritime crafts" with the first mention of the materials; I was glad to have little tidbits of context later but would like to read the whole article with any physical descriptions of the work at the beginning.
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