Sari Carel: A More Perfect Circle

​Sari Carel, A More Perfect Circle, 2024

 

The exhibition is an intimate iteration of Sari Carel: A More Perfect Circle, 2024, originally an outdoors installation by the artist. The research-based commission that informed this project is inspired by the single-use coffee cup, a ubiquitous object that brings into focus people’s daily experience of interacting with trash. This project connects our personal encounters with disposable objects to the wider systems that fill our lives with waste.

 

The installation at the KODA House kitchen showcases glazed ceramics, preparatory sketches and other related pieces. The handmade, intentional, and individualized quality of each unit contrasts with the mass-manufactured coffee cup that is a kind of visual blueprint for the work. On view is also a selection of pieces from recent exhibits and bodies of work that continue threads of inquiry into single use culture, the omnipresence of plastic remnants in our daily lives and their relationships with other materials and objects in our living spaces and our refuse.

 

Sari Carel: A More Perfect Circle is informed by research the artist conducted in collaboration with Nicholas Hoynes, a PhD student in Environmental Sociology at NYU. They surveyed employees and patrons of local coffee shops about their daily experience with single-use objects. Their research uncovered a sense of powerlessness and conflict about a choice at the center of a daily routine. What happens to that daily, single-use plastic-lined paper coffee cup when you toss it in the trash can, and what does it mean to take that for granted? 

 

For the artist, the dilemma of how to address the single-use issue intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic when local restrictions prevented reusable thermoses. Carel saved her own coffee cups, which became objects of study as they piled up in her studio. Her observations of this stackable form with its inherent intimacy, an object that is held, sipped from, briefly owned and then discarded, is the model for the collective objects on display.

 

The installation also features ceramic forms reminiscent of Brancusi’s Endless Columns, as well as graphs generated from the surveys. Sculptures are modeled after disposable coffee cups stacked, alternatingly, end-to-end or rim-to-rim. Ceramic pieces in the shape of plastic cup covers—some  glazed to evoke pie charts drawn from Carel and Hoynes’ research—hang on the walls and hide in kitchen cupboards. The artist’s choice to work in clay also evokes the industrial use of the material in landfills, in an attempt  to mitigate the seepage of toxic sludge into clean soil and water. 

 

About the Artist

Sari Carel is a Brooklyn-based, interdisciplinary artist and environmental activist. Her projects consider interspecies communication, nature and the built environment, and how the senses inform perception. Sari Carel participated in a KODA Land + Environment artist residency in 2021. She was offered a studio space on Governors Island in partnership with Swale House, exhibited at FiveMyles and organized a tree-care and stewardship workshop with Trees NY in Brooklyn, NY. Recent exhibitions: The Sun Is A Mouth Of Blue at Melanie Flood Projects, Portland, OR; The Shape Of Play, a public art project in Boston’s North End, and Mud Songs For Anni at The Schneider Museum of Art’s Art Beyond in Ashland, OR. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Stundars Museum, Solf, Finland; Atelier Stipendium des Bundeskanzleramtes, Vienna, Austria; and Bundanon, Illaroo, Australia; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; and LMCC Residency on Governors Island, NY, among others. She is a recent recipient of a commissions award for Korea Art Forum's 2024-2025 “Shared Dialogue, Shared Space” program. (www.saricarel.com)

 

Funding

Sari Carel: A More Perfect Circle was originally commissioned in 2024 by KODA and curated by Jennifer McGregor at Lentol Garden and the Greenpoint Library and its Environmental Education Center. The project was supported, in part, by public funds from The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; Brooklyn Arts Council; The New York Community Trust, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. KODA’s program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.