Event 2 Blog: Jess Irish and This Moral Plastik

 Jess Irish is an artist looking to bring attention to the overuse of single-use plastics on the planet, and other environmental concerns. Her work really is relevant to our times in an environmental crisis, which has resulted in an outpouring of art with realized political effects (McKibben). Jess Irish and Professor Vesna met at UCSB, where they were eventually colleagues at the New School in Parsons. The professor described her as a “kindred spirit”, and I believe her artwork portrays that. Her artwork raises awareness about our planet in the hopes of inspiring change with interests in sustainability and community activism. 

                                                                                

We started the event by watching Jess Irish’s documentary, This Mortal Plastik, which plays with visuals and sound. Rachel Carson’s story A Fable for Tomorrow asks readers to imagine a hypothetical future without songbirds, utilizing storytelling to incite change, which Irish uses as her inspiration (Carson). In her documentary, Irish shows a video she created of hands clutching a variety of plastic materials, moving them around in their hands. Her artwork in this scene demonstrates the human tendency to grapple with the effects of this plastic and what the future holds as the topic of climate change slowly encompasses our lives due to our own presence on the Earth. She discusses how polyethylene plastic has become such an ingrained material in our society, originating from the matter of eons past. This makes me wonder how exploitative the process is that converts natural, organic material which has such an honorary history into single-use plastics which have such a detrimental impact on our planet. 

In her documentary, Jess Irish also discusses the intersections of the environmental crisis which includes race. Her documentary sheds light on a majority-minority town struggling against a power plant built over old sugarcane fields that had been active before the civil war. Clearly, the environmental crisis plays a role in the continued historic exploitation of people of color. The climate crisis has brought forth alarmist works that encourage us to reflect on where “we end and the world begins (Lescaze).

Works Cited

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002.

Irish, Jess. This Mortal Plastik. 2021.

Lescaze, Zoë. “How Should Art Reckon with Climate Change?” The New York Times, 25 Mar. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/t-magazine/art-climate-change.html.

McKibben, Bill. “What the Warming World Needs Now Is Art, Sweet Art.” Grist, 22 Apr. 2005, https://grist.org/article/mckibben-imagine/.