When you think “artifact” you probably imagine arrow heads, dinosaur bones or clay pots dug up by anthropologists and put on display in museums. Your mind most likely takes you back thousands of years, imagining what life was like in the past and how these old ruins served as useful tools to hunt or collect water. You probably don’t think about the everyday grocery bags that outlive their minimal value quickly and end up polluting our oceans and endangering species, never biodegrading, lasting centuries in our landfills. Carol Sogard has a different perspective on these everyday items. In her new exhibit, Artifacts For the 23rd Century, Carol has taken the deconstructed plastic bags and woven them into modern day artifacts. She is raising questions about the necessity of their intended function and giving them tactile function that long outlasts their single-use lives. “Carol’s use of ubiquitous materials comes with a bit of finger pointing, but also with an alternative solution to the problem” says UMOCA Curator of Exhibitions Jared Steffensen “If the material qualities that make plastic bags so long lasting can be exploited to make functional objects and keep them out of our oceans landfills, it’s something that should be explored.”
Artifacts For the 23rd Century will be exhibited at The Utah Museum of Contemporary Arts (UMOCA) from September 22 to January 14 with an opening reception from 7 pm to 9 pm on September 22.
