post-industrial salvaged micoplastics, salvaged wetsuits, respirators, goggles, ear protection, tar, feathers, MAGA hat, Pussy hat, salvaged plastic sheeting, found objects (t.v, crates, bench, plastic grating), surgical booties, pvc, binder clips, staples, air compressor, caution signs, synthetic grass, marine debris
10’ H x 25’ W x 50’ D
2019
“Politicians, mass media, and the general public are more preoccupied with blaming and shaming each other than with proposing solutions to humans’ most urgent problems, like the climate crisis, habitat destruction, and extreme plastic pollution. Polish-born, US-based artist Basia Goszczynska puts these absurd inefficiencies and contradictions front and center in her installation Alien Nation at Chashama’s Space to Present at One Brooklyn Bridge Park.
The first thing you see is a plastic curtain—a semi-transparent barrier made from the ubiquitous packing material that covers so many of the objects we consume. Past this threshold, you find a grassy room with a TV in the corner playing an 8-hour nature sounds relaxation video off YouTube. You wonder if anyone actually listens to the whole thing and try to remember the last time you spent eight hours in nature. There’s a chair by the table and a box of surgical booties. As you sit to put them on, your mind fills with images of oil spills and leaking bodies.
You walk through another plastic curtain into a similar room that contains an air compressor with a hose attachment, metal grate flooring, and a sprinkling of rainbow-colored bits of plastic. More of the plastic confetti slips under a third curtain, which draws you into the final chamber. Once inside, you realize what the air compressor is for: the floor is covered with the cheery micro-plastics that immediately start sticking to your clothes. A figure lying in the plastic draws your attention, and each detail on the body crescendos to a sensory overload: limbs spread as if caught in the act of being drawn and quartered, or making a snow angel, the figure is wearing a wetsuit, safety goggles, respirator, and a red Make America Great Again hat. You notice another figure on the other side of the room with the same accoutrements, except a pink Pussyhat replaces the MAGA cap. Both figures are tarred and feathered.
The visual chaos reflects Goszczynska’s anxiety about the future, as well as her opposing fatalism and optimism. She asks her viewers to consider how we—individuals and culture at large—can reconcile the conflicting possibilities of the end of the world as we know it and a future with harmony between technology, culture, and the environment.”
Text by Amelia Rina
Documentation photographs by Shark Senesac
