Biography

Kelly Jazvac creates art using plastic sourced from the advertising industry, alongside other sustainable and reclaimed materials. She is a member of The Synthetic Collective, a plastic pollution research team composed of scientists, artists, and humanists, whose work significantly influences Jazvac’s artistic practice. Her recent exhibitions include “Broken Nature” at The Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Musée D’Art Contemporain of Montréal, the Eli and Edyth Broad Museum (East Lansing), Ujazdowski Castle CCA (Warsaw), and FIERMAN Gallery (New York). Her work has been featured in National Geographic, e-flux Journal, Hyperallergic, Art Forum, The New Yorker, Canadian Art Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. Jazvac’s co-authored art/science research has been published in scientific journals such as Nature Reviews, GSA Today, and Science of the Total Environment. Based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal, she serves as an Associate Professor in Studio Arts at Concordia University. Her artwork is held in the collections of Museum London, the Musée D’Art Contemporain, the Yale Peabody Museum, RBC, CDPQ, and various private collections.

Plastiglomerates (Plastiglomérat) (2013)

Courtesy of the artist

In 2013, at the suggestion of oceanographer Charles Moore, and with the assistance of activists Noni Sanford, Ron Sanford and Megan Lamson, geologist Patricia Corcoran and artist Kelly Jazvac began a research project on a type of existing stone they described as “Plastiglomerate”, shown here as found object artworks. The stones consist of a mix of molten plastic debris and beach sediment, including sand, wood, and rock. A co-authored manuscript of that research was published by GSA Today, called “An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record”, and suggests that this plastic hybrid material has the potential to act as a geologic indicator of our current moment in the future geologic record of Earth. This text is the 4th collaborative scientific paper that Jazvac has published with the Synthetic Collective – an art/science research group that studies plastic pollution through an interdisciplinary and environmentally-attuned methodology.