Sponsored by the American Littoral Society - Northeast Chapter
See how one Beach Captain created art from debris collected off of Long Island's shorelines.
A video of the installation can be seen on YouTube at
Sea Change: An Underwater Art Installation at the Tilles Center.
PRESS RELEASE
“Sea Change”, an underwater installation by Sally Shore and Barbara Grossman Karyo, will be on view from September 2013 through July 2014 in the atrium at Tilles Center for Performing Arts at LIU Post. Taking advantage of the aquarium-like atmosphere of the glass Atrium, “Sea Change” evokes the experience of being underwater with creatures and vegetation that have been created with some of the detritus invading our natural environment.
The impetus for the project occurred in March 2011 when a waste treatment plant in Westchester accidentally released millions of plastic water filtration disks into the Long Island Sound and they were washing up on beaches all along the north shore of Long Island, NY.
A call for help went out to members of the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor. Two local artists, Sally Shore and Barbara Karyo, were members of the team that picked up, in the course of an hour, approximately 23,000 disks from Tappen and Sea Cliff beaches in Nassau County. Standing amid the bulging bags of disks the friends looked at each other and simultaneously declared ”I’m going to do something with these.”
Sally Shore works primarily with fiber and Barbara Karyo works primarily in clay. For the initial project Sally incorporated ribbons and other fibers with the disks to recreate the experience of finding piles of them caught in and under the seaweed on the beach. Barbara, who had been playing with crocheting plastic, incorporated that material with the disks to create a large fish with the intention of towing it to Mamaroneck, hoping to draw attention to the possible ecological disaster that might occur with the ingestion of the disks by fish and birds.
As a result of applying for a grant from Art Under Glass, the project was expanded to become an installation. Sally created the surface of the water filled with rainbows of sensuous vegetation and Barbara crocheted a variety of large, whimsical creatures to swim through it.
The installation will be on view until July 2014 when the box office is open and during evening performances at the Tilles Center.
Tilles Center for the Performing Arts is located at LIU Post, Route 25A in Brookville, NY.
Media Inquiries please contact:
Sally Shore- sjshore@optonline.net, 516 647-5052
Barbara Karyo- Bgkart@optonline.net, 516 801-0298
Public Information: 516 299-3100, Tuesday-Friday, 1-5 pm
In April a wastewater treatment plant under construction in Westchester accidentally released approximately 21 million plastic disks into the Long Island Sound. Hundreds of thousands of these ended up on the beaches of the North Shore of Long Island. Artists Barbara Karyo and Sally Shore were some of those involved in cleaning the plastic up from the beach. Both decided to create works of art from the disks, “turning flotsam into beauty,” in the words of Ms. Shore. They will both discuss their intentions and methods in a talk, “Reclaiming the Beach,” at 2:00 pm on Sunday, June 12 at the Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery of the Art League of Long Island. The public is invited.
Disk Fish by Barbara Karyo
“A small group of volunteers from the Coalition to Save Hempstead Harbor spent one hour hand picking up the plastic disks from our local beaches,” explained Ms. Karyo. “We collected over 25,000. As I was collecting them I was thinking of how I could use them to make a statement about how we abuse the environment and the creatures that inhabit it. My project is to construct a very big fish using the disks as the body. The head of the fish is made from crocheted plastic bags. Members of the community and other artists joined me to tie thousands of these disks together.”
Ms. Shore stated, “In trying to find a way to re-purpose these water filtration disks, I considered how I had found many of them: tangled up in the straw, shells and sea weed at the high tide line along the beaches where I collected them. Tying them together with narrow ribbons in the colors of vegetation was the most satisfying of my solutions. I had envisioned them being seen from both sides hanging at the gallery as a false ceiling, floating, as if on the surface of the water of Long Island Sound. The project also works quite well as a two-sided partition.” This is how the finished work is installed in the “Reclaiming Eden” exhibit now showing at the Art League of Long Island’s Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery.
Detailed view of Reclaiming the Beach: The Colony
