ARLINGTON ARTS CENTER
Opening Reception: Friday, June 18th

The life span of a plastic bag is 450 years, as far as experts can predict.Imagine hanging around that long? Hanging on fences, trees, rooftops and streets, circling around the world, hanging on almost everything.

Americans use more than 90 billion plastic bags  a year and less than 9% get recycled.They choke birds, fish, whales, seals, turtles, and other marine animals are killed by plastic bags. Made from polyethylene, a material from crude oil and natural gas, both non-renewable resources, plastic bags are the fifth most common debris found on beaches.

I view this body of work as a “Code of the Landscape/Seascape”. The white represents the pristine environment, the black as the  text speaking to us, saying things like, “STOP, THAT HURTS!” or “DON’T DO THAT AGAIN!” The red represents

“DANGER!” a great state of toxicity, the point of no return.  I completed the largest work in this series “Environmental State of Emergency” long before the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but I hope this exhibit will draw attention to how harmful human behavior has become to our natural surroundings. Our continued use of plastic bags is but another factor contributing to this demise.

The life of a plastic bag must be an awful journey--dirty, discarded, decaying, diminishing ever so slowly, an unhappy life, indeed.
Sabyna Sterrett, June 2010