Kelly Jazvac
Loki Shoulder,
2022
Salvaged PVC billboards, thread, 283.5” x 226” at largest points. Photo Credit: Thomas Demand.
Projection description
For the last fifteen years, Kelly Jazvac has made artworks with plastic discards from the advertising industry, in doing so, she works toward a more environmentally-friendly way of making art. Jazvac is interested in linking the environmental ethic to the evidence present in these materials: that is, the human behaviours and attitudes that enable the climate crisis. This evidence is representationally, symbolically and physically embedded in the found photography that makes up the majority of her practice. In 2022, MOCA Toronto commissioned Jazvac to produce a site-specific intervention for the museum. To create the work, Jazvac acquired large-scale billboard images, which with a team of students she manipulated to create a series of sculptural thresholds. While the original image/s are somewhat tangible, Jazvac’s transformation of the billboard introduces new readings and concerns with which to negotiate. Jazvac’s artistic practice literally and metaphorically expands how we relate to and understand the potential of photographic narrative to interrogate our relationship with images, consumerism and plastics. She reminds us all to look with a more critical eye at the quality and messaging of the imagery that surrounds us as she critiques our consumerist economy, and through recycling presents an innovative way to continue working with the photographic medium.
About the Artist
Kelly Jazvac is a Canadian artist currently in residence at the Conseils des Arts et Lettres Québec residency in New York City and collaborating with the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons, The New School. Earlier in the year, she was invited to Dr. Carlos Peña-Malacara’s lab at the Instituto de Biotechnología at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as part of an ongoing collaboration on bioplastics. Jazvac is also a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, which includes scientists, artists, and humanists. The work of this research group is highly influential on Jazvac’s artistic practice. Her recent exhibitions include Broken Nature at The Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Musée D’Art Contemporain (Montréal); the Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum (East Lansing); Ujazdowski Castle CCA (Warsaw); and Galerie Nicolas Robert (Montréal). Her work has been written about in National Geographic, e-flux Journal, Hyperallergic, Art Forum, The New Yorker, Canadian Art Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. Her co-authored art/science research has been published in scientific journals including Nature Reviews, GSA Today, and Science of the Total Environment. Jazvac is based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal where she is an Associate Professor in Studio Arts at Concordia University.
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