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Mandy Barker
Digital print
England
Mandy's work aims to engage with and stimulate an emotional response in the viewer by combining a contradiction between initial aesthetic attraction and subsequent message of awareness. Her work has been exhibited worldwide and is now focused on the representation of material debris in the sea and more recently on the mass accumulation of plastic in the world's oceans.
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Edward Burtynsky
Digital Print
Canada
Edward is a respected Canadian photographer. His photographic depictions of global industrial landscapes are included in the collections of over fifty major museums around the world. His imagery explores the intricate link between industry and nature, combining the raw elements of mining, quarrying, manufacturing, shipping, oil production and recycling into eloquent, highly expressive visions that find beauty and humanity in the most unlikely of places.
Chris Arend/Anchorage Museum
Dianna Cohen
Plastic bags, handles, thread
Los Angeles
By using plastic bags as her primary medium, Dianna Cohen halts the usual cycle of production, distribution and disposal and calls upon viewers to reevaluate the aesthetic potential of such a common object. Dianna believes there are few objects more representative of contemporary First World culture than the plastic shopping bag, but because we see and use so many bags in the course of a day, we're not likely to pay them much attention before we discard or recycle them.
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Fran Crowe
Found objects
England
As a lifelong collector, Fran collects debris while walking on beaches near her home. Her work reflects her increasing kind of self-portrait of ourselves: a contemporary – and disturbing –archaeological dig.
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John Dahlsen
Digital print on canvas
Australia
John is an Australian contemporary artist exploring environmental issues in his work. He uses found objects, primarily plastic bags, from Australian beaches to create his artwork.
Chris Arend/Anchorage Museum
Mark Dion
Mixed media
New York
Mark is known for his use of scientific presentations in his installations. By appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering and exhibiting objects, Mark creates works that go against the grain of dominant culture and question the distinctions between objective (rational) scientific methods and subjective (irrational) influences.
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Andrew Hughes
Digital prints
England
Andy's photographic works reflect a concern with the ocean, beach and environmental issues. For more than 20 years, Andrew has made work influenced by his passion for the Coastal Environment.
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Chris Jordan
Digital photograph
Seattle
Chris is best known for his large-scale works depicting mass consumption and waste, particularly garbage. Chris’ recent work has focused on Midway Atoll, a remote cluster of islands more than 2,000 miles from the nearest continent, where the detritus of our mass consumption surfaces in an astonishing place: inside the stomachs of thousands of dead baby albatrosses.
Chris Arend/Anchorage Museum
Sonya Kelliher-Combs
Mixed media
Anchorage
Sonya offers a chronicle of the ongoing struggle for self-definition and identity in the Alaska context. It is her goal and mission to bring awareness, to educate, and to perpetuate the arts and traditions of the many diverse cultures of Alaska.
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Karen Larsen
Microplastics, antique jars, water, driftwood
Anchorage
Karen produces large-scale environmental pieces and interventions that blend art and design. Her curated and programmed exhibitions are often experimental, creating temporal works that explore materials and concepts. She is the principal of Creative Space.
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Elizabeth Leader
Pencil drawing
Buffalo, New York
Elizabeth is an environmental artist with an eye for urban decay. She paints with oils and acrylics and uses a wide variety of materials to communicate ideas about “the trail we leave behind us.”
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Max Liboiron
Styrofoam from river dock, pollutants, salt, mixed media
Brooklyn, New York
Max’s installations are experiments that investigate how different types of actions and values can potentially contribute to a sustainable economic and material future. She used damaged materials from an old Dawson City dock in the Yukon, Canada as a basis for a series of miniature northern landscapes, showing the damage done by pollutants.
Chris Arend/Anchorage Museum
Pam Longobardi
Plastics, steel armature, drift nets and floats
Atlanta
Pam’s artwork addresses the psychological relationship of humans to the natural world. Her Drifters Project documents and transforms oceanic marine debris into installations and photography and provides a visual statement about the engine of global consumption and the impact of plastic objects on the world’s most remote places and its creatures.
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Susan Middleton
Digital print
San Francisco
For the past 30 years, Susan has specialized in the portraiture of rare and endangered animals, plants, sites and cultures. Her work is inspired by the earth’s biological and cultural diversity and motivated by the need to protect it.
Chris Arend/Anchorage Museum
Cynthia Minet
Plastics, LEDs
Lost Angeles
Cynthia’s work combines an interest in scientific and ecological issues with an investigation of materials. She is known for her series of large-scale animal sculptures, which are made from recycled and repurposed plastic items. The sculptures are a comment on waste but also a reflection on the complicated relationships humans have with the world we inhabit.
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Tuula Narhinen
Digital video
Finland
Tuula is an investigative artist who has built cameras that produce images of what she imagines the world looks to a fly or a bear. She has developed methods for letting trees trace the shape of wind on their branches and found techniques for using cold winter air to create patterns on paper and glass. Homemade instruments and a documentation of the working method are important elements of her works.
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Anne Percoco
Digital print
Jersey City, New Jersey
Anne spends as much time exploring, scavenging for materials, and researching as she does making art. She primarily uses found materials that are widely considered to be worthless and makes full use of each material’s unique sculptural properties as well as its historical, cultural, and environmental resonances.
Chris Arend/Anchorage Museum
Tim Remick
Mixed media
Anchorage
Tim established Tim Remick Photography LLC in 2001 and has produced commercial, editorial, portraiture, fine art, research and expedition documentation, and stock images for clients throughout Southcentral Alaska. The photographic series After – Portraits from Denali is a visual exploration of the human condition after climbing North America’s highest peak and has been recognized by the Alaska State Museum in Juneau and the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center.
Chris Arend/Anchorage Museum
Alexis Rockman
Oil and alkyd on wood
New York
Alexis is known for his paintings that provide rich depictions of future landscapes as they might exist with impacts of climate change and evolution influenced by genetic engineering. Many of his works have been inspired by his travels around the world.
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Evelyn Rydz
Pencil and color pencil on drafting film
Boston
Evelyn creates detailed drawings based on her photographs from various coastlines of lost and discarded objects that have washed ashore. She explores the history and possible interconnection between these displaced objects by focusing on the narratives these found objects have gathered on their journeys.
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Joan Wadleigh Curran
Gouache on paper
Philadelphia
Joan creates unique still-life compositions consisting of plant life and the discarded and overlooked objects of trash. Her paintings elevate everyday junk, removed from its exterior context, and are arranged to create striking compositions, which serve as a larger statement about humanity and challenges our notions of beauty and merit.
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Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang
Digital print
California
Since 1999, Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang have been visiting 1,000 yards of Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Sea Shore to gather plastic debris washing out of the Pacific Ocean. By carefully collecting and "curating" the bits of plastic, they create works of art to show the material as it is.
Chris Arend/Anchorage Museum
Rebecca Lyon
Mixed media
Alaska
Rebecca is an Athabascan/Alutiiq artist from Anchorage whose work has been displayed in the Anchorage Museum. Lyon uses nontraditional materials to create women’s regalia and other pieces of art.
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Steve McPherson
Plastic objects, entomology pins and text on card
United Kingdom
Steve is an artist and lecturer whose practice includes installation, sculpture, objects, book works, collections, assemblage, collage, experimental drawing, photography, video and sound. Most recently, he combines and arranges found objects from his local coast, with a summary text that gives a potential identity and history to the collated flotsam and jetsam.
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Sue Ryan
Recycled wire, synthetic ghost net, beach rope, cotton thread
Australia
Sue works with the Ghost Nets organization of Australia. Ghost nets are fishing nets that have been abandoned at sea, lost accidentally or deliberately discarded and end up traveling the oceans of the world with the currents and tides, continually fishing as they progress through the waters.
