Post Plastic
A solo exhibition by Elgin Rust
16.07.2020 - 27.08.2020
AVA Mezzanine Gallery
In her latest exhibition Post-Plastic, Elgin Rust explores and reassess our relationship with our environment. Through her work, she highlights how the materials we create to make our lives easier are impacting our physical and mental health. Plastic, originally applauded as a cheap saviour of humanity has turned out to be our number one pollutant, its toxic contents seeping into every pore of our existence.
Post Plastic is a collection of mixed media artworks. From prints capturing the emptied airless residue of the deflated object to concrete-filled volumes making manifest the fullness of the inflatable.
Using inflatable objects as her starting point, Rust explores what plastic means for our society in the long run. Armed with a collection of other peoples' “pool party trash”, discarded pool toys such as balls, lilos, armbands, and rings, Rust transforms these objects by applying art processes directly to them, capturing forms what could be termed “post plastic”.
Rust’s work, both printed and sculptural, records the darker side of the plastic inflatable. Originally associated with safe family fun, assisting bodies to float, Rust turns the idea inflatable inside out. By casting the object in concrete, the object becomes devoid of warmth and despite its tactile shape, it is far from safe. By creating a sense of the uncanny and imbuing an ordinary object with emotive power the work can be understood to stand in for people. The sculptural surfaces bear witness to ruination, covered in a network of tiny cracks and bubbles, conveying the notion of the last breath. In this way, both series speak of the process of deconstruction, of lives post a traumatic event. The works are beautiful, fragile objects that record the act of transformation.
Her ongoing fascination with the inflatable object, a toy but also a swimming aid, conjures images of happy family summers days by the pool, as well as evoking the tragic migrant journeys towards a better life and the associated cost of living. These notions are transformed through processes applied to the original object and thus the works speak more loosely of time, transformation, translation, traces, and the continual process of life: inhalation: exhalation, oxygen: carbon dioxide, solid: liquid, round: flat.
Rust’s attempts to record a factual truth of the object by taking a print of the inflatable is much like taking a fingerprint for identification purposes- a record of an object that is no longer present. This new truth could be understood as post-truth defined as “a philosophical concept that refers to the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth and the circuitous slippage between facts or alt-facts, knowledge, opinion, belief, and truth”.
Artist Biography
Elgin Rust was born in Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1974. She is a South African artist who received her MFA with distinction at the University of Cape Town in 2010. Rust is a mixed media practitioner making use of printmaking, sculpture, and performative installations in her self-motivated and collaborative oeuvre. She playfully re-imagines legal procedures and theories to give rise to new meaning using images and objects alike. Under the #truthtroughplay her process-driven work embraces techniques from wood carving, slip casting ceramics to performative collaborative all-immersive site-specific installations. Rust has participated in solo, group and collaborative exhibitions at the AVA Gallery and the Oliewenhuis Art Museum as well as participating at Chale Wote Street Art Festival 2018, Ghana with the collaborative project Ubulungiswa/Justice 2015. Currently, she is preparing Ilizwe/Nyika/Nation Collaboration for the Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm, 2021.
