By Cinara Marquis
The Plattsburgh State Art Museum boasts over 10,000 works of art and artifacts. Yet, when you walk into the Myers Lobby Gallery, all you see is trash.
Shoes sprawl across the floor, clothing scraps are scattered along the walls, and plastic waste is strewn around the ceiling. What is this?
The exhibit features props from “The Water Station,” a play without words directed by Julia Devine, lecturer of theater and English, in October earlier. The water station, which previously sustained weary travelers stands tall still, but is now empty and surrounded by waste. Another prop from the performance, a pile of shoes that housed a homeless person, sits nearby.
The Cardinal Foundation Seminars “Creativity for Life,” taught by Devine, and “Fashion and Sustainability,” taught by Erika Guay, associate professor of theater, were involved in creating the props. Devine and Guay collaborated with their students to create set pieces out of collected trash, shoes and thrift store donations.
“The Water Station” was performed in conversation with “Climate’s Shipwreck Ballad” by Robin Lasser and “Transmutation Traces” by Marguerite Perret, an exhibition above the Myers Lobby Gallery in the Burke and Slatkin galleries.
“The set pieces and other trash ephemera now live on in a temporary lobby installation in Myers,” Devine wrote in an email. “It’s an echo of what was and what will be.”
The exhibit serves as a physical manifestation of the themes explored in “The Water Station,” “Climate’s Shipwreck Ballad” and “Transmutation Traces.”
Test tubes are filled with polluted water, calling back to Lasser and Perret’s exhibitions raising alarm to the degradation of Lake Champlain.
The water station surrounded by waste symbolizes the environmental decay caused by human neglect and wastefulness. The pile of shoes, once part of a homeless person’s life, now stands empty — a poignant reminder of the human cost of this neglect.
Students in Devine’s class further utilized trash pieces to create Dada Readymades and illustrations using trash objects. Dada Readymades is an art movement that challenges traditional notions of what constitutes art by transforming ordinary objects into unique pieces. Often these objects are isolated from their original context and given a new meaning.
“Trash or treasure?” Devine asked. “It’s up to the viewer to decide.”
Exhibit-goers are invited to participate by pinning trash onto the wall of the gallery. This interactive element encourages visitors to actively engage with the exhibit. Devine wanted viewers to contemplate this act — “Is it art now?”
The exhibit calls viewers to reflect on the nature of art and the potential for everyday objects to be contexualized or recontextualized as something meaningful.
“Just as energy is neither created nor destroyed, we can continually reuse, repeat, recycle, return, renew and remake,” Devine wrote.
The exhibit at the Myers Lobby Gallery is more than just an art installation, it’s a call to action, urging us to rethink our relationship with waste and to recognize the hidden histories and meaning in the discarded. By showcasing the work of students and highlighting the intersection of art and sustainability, the exhibit challenges us to consider the broader implications of our consumption and the vast possibilities for creative reuse.
For more information about the exhibit and upcoming events at the Plattsburgh State Art Museum, visit it’s website at plattsburgh.edu/plattslife/arts/art-museum/index.html
