PLASTIC FANTASTIC!
2021 - 2022 | Harlem Art Park

Within society, contradictions abound. As participants in the astonishing deeds and misdeeds of the 21st Century, we watch as ecological concerns do battle daily with a modern society that struggles to preserve nature as it knows it is destroying it at an ever-increasing rate.
 
How else to explain the drive to consumerism that fuels our economy, creates jobs and delivers a truly advanced lifestyle, in direct conflict with the proliferation of waste that is polluting our environment at every level.
 
Multi-media artist Capucine Bourcart has been troubled by this paradox for years. For her call to action she has obsessed on the single-use plastic bags which she has been collecting for years, gathering them from friends and neighbors and recycling them in her artwork. This
accumulation is hardly difficult when NYC residents use more than 10 BILLION single use
plastic bags annually!
 
Plastic Fantastic!, her large-scale installation recently unveiled in Harlem Art Park, converts this conundrum into an impressive work of art measuring 66 feet wide
and 7 feet high. Comprised of about 1,600 squares and rectangles of aluminum on which Bourcart has printed a
panorama of colorful images of plastic bags, she replicates the dichotomy: the beauty of the individual bag and what it represents in carrying, piece by piece, the treasures and acquisitions of our modern lives while causing us to reflect on the damage we are doing to our planet but more dramatically, to us.

Bourcart makes her concerns felt with irony - contrasting the beauty and the danger - and invites the public to see these bags individually and collectively, asking us to consider our role in this modern-day dilemma. This is the artist at work, causing us to see what is truly before our eyes but with new considerations. Will we really ban these bags?

Plastic Fantastic! Is made possible with funding provided by the LMCC, Puffin Foundation and Friends of Art Park Alliance