The Bag Lady Issue #40

Kara Davin ventures into the deep with Jellyfish

By Lou Battaglia
Published: August 1st, 2009 | 12:00am

Kara Daving has synthesized her passion for both the environment and her art by exploring the problematic, yet strangely striking intersection of the synthetic and natural worlds. The 26-year-old Buffalo-based artist admits that “eco-art” is a critical designation that she has mixed feelings about, but her work offers more than the genre’s conventional condemnation of pollution.

Daving explains that her current Jellyfish series, which consists of majestic images of jellyfish painted atop recycled plastic bag canvases, examines “the synthetic things we make in our culture and what happens when those items are displaced in the natural world and, as a result, become a part of it.” By utilizing the plastic bag — an unnecessary byproduct of personal, small-scale consumption — Daving is emphasizing that pollution is a phenomenon that stems from personal choices rather than the neglect of a society at large.

Daving’s work begins with the creation of a homemade canvas that consists of anywhere from two to 50 recycled bags that she collects from her “plastic-bag hunts.” The canvases are constructed by cutting, shaping, and layering the bags and binding them together with acrylic gloss paint. Daving then adds layers of darkly colored acrylic paint to this textured, uneven mass of plastic — which is at times two inches thick — until the flowing texture and rich color of the ocean’s depth is recreated. On top of this, Daving then skillfully renders her effervescent jellyfish.

This creates a perplexing visual statement that serves not only as an autopsy of what Daving calls “the afterlife of consumerism,” but also as evidence of the disquieting symmetry between wildlife and the garbage that clings to it. “I find it interesting that in 2009 we’re making these synthetic products that look extremely similar to natural organisms that date back 500-billion years,” says Daving, who finds irony in the fact that other elements of wildlife (such as sea turtles) fatally mistake these iridescent plastic bags as a food source like jellyfish.

This irony continues on a personal level. After all of Daving’s work to critically reframe the ubiquitous plastic bag that most of us are conditioned to ignore, or some — aided by the infamous scene in American Beauty where a free-floating plastic bag was ridiculously cast as a symbol of existential liberation — may even smile upon, she begrudgingly admits to admiring the “transient, vagabond life of plastic bags … how they blow along, never knowing what’s ahead.” In part, Daving’s work is a documentation of the infinite stages within the eternal life of plastic bags.

Daving’s Jellyfish is currently on display at EcoCenter San Francisco (karadaving.com).