Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present Deep Waters, an exhibition of work by artist Amanda Thackray. On view from September 5th – September 27th, 2020 at the Guttenberg Arts Gallery. To promote social distancing Guttenberg Arts is now strictly open by appointment only and virtually on their website. Patrons can schedule their visit or view the virtual gallery by going to www.guttenbergarts.org/exhibitions.
Amanda Thackray employs hand papermaking processes as a primary medium in her practice to create complex forms referencing microscopia. She derives the content for her work through lengthy periods of research, guided by the tenuous relationship between the utility and detritus of human-made artifacts, focusing on our burden of plastic waste. She is equally terrified and fascinated by the ability of plastic to break down into smaller and smaller microplastics, while never actually degrading.
Thackray’s research into the pervasiveness of plastics in our environments and our bodies is visualized as large scale installations of quasi-fictional landscapes. Explored through simulacra of handmade paper, projects telescope between the spaces of the microscopic human body and the vastness of worldwide bodies of water. These dimensional landscapes present themselves as detailed yet ambiguous fiber studies and fictitious maps of overwhelming polluted ocean. Thackray utilizes imagery of netting to convey multilayered references attributed to both organic bodily material and human-made, rigid, immortal plastic – the net is a malleable grid concurrently acting as a trap and a sieve.
Through working with handmade paper, Thackray engages with water – often site-specific water – to create imagery that is directly tied, both materially and conceptually, to that same water. Revealing a murky space occupying parallel bodies – human bodies and bodies of water – this narrative foreshadows new territory for her practice and begins to build a conceptual bridge between microplastics-polluted waterways and human bodies filled with the same microscopic plastics.
Amanda Thackray is a multidisciplinary artist and educator, based in Newark, NJ, whose practice sits at the intersection of craft, sculpture, and environmentally-based social practice. Thackray’s projects have been exhibited at The Newark Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, The Montclair Art Museum, The NARS Foundation, and The Knockdown Center. She is the recipient of a 2020 Creative Catalyst Fund Artist Fellowship. She has been awarded numerous residencies including The Arctic Circle in Svalbard, Norway, and artist-in-residence at the Museum of Art and Design in NYC. Her work is in over a dozen public collections including The Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Mediatheque Andre Malraux, France, Yale University, and The Library of Congress. She teaches printmaking at SUNY Purchase and Rutgers University. Thackray earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Exhibition: Sept. 5th, 2020 – Sept. 27, 2020; Opening Saturday September 5th. Schedule your visit by going to www.guttenbergarts.org/exhibitions For more information please contact matt@guttenbergarts.org or 201-868-8585. Guttenberg Art Gallery is free and open to the public by appointment only. www.guttenbergarts.org Guttenberg Arts programming is made possible by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a division of the Department of State, and administered by the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, Thomas A. Degise, Hudson County Executive & the Hudson County Board of Chosen Freeholders.
