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CHRISTY RUPP | Streaming
Fairfield University Art Museum | Walsh Gallery, January 19 - April 27, 2024

CHRISTY RUPP | Streaming: Fairfield University Art Museum | Walsh Gallery

Past exhibition
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Overview
CHRISTY RUPP | Streaming, Fairfield University Art Museum | Walsh Gallery
"Christy Rupp dives into this dystopia with welded steel, foraged plastic detritus, historical, scientific, and contemporary imagery, a dark sense of humor, and the uncanny ability to connect the dots."

Since the '70s, Christy Rupp's sculptures and works on paper have explored the relationship
between economics and the environment. Rupp seeks to make this complex topic – one usually examined in abstract articles – into a clear and direct visual narrative accessible beyond the language of dissertations, punditry, and scientific studies. Emerging from the lens of Discard Studies, a discipline that considers the systems and consequences of waste, Rupp weighs these systems and their short-term benefits against the long-term costs of climate degradation and the marginalization of threatened species.

 

Buried in history, politics, and culture, the politics of waste are rooted in consumerism with its voracious consumption and energy needs. Christy Rupp dives into this dystopia with welded steel, foraged plastic detritus, historical, scientific, and contemporary imagery, a dark sense of humor, and the uncanny ability to connect the dots. Her artwork charts a course through the turmoil, observing the trail of collateral damage as it moves through our world, seeking to interpret and magnify these interdependencies.

 

Some examples of Rupp';s visual unification of cause and effect are found in her installation
Moby Debris, a collection of microplanktonic organisms made from welded steel rods and
discarded plastic. To quote artist and art scholar Ellen K. Levy, “Rupp considers how waste and toxic elements in our environment corrupt the accepted way in which organisms function and evolve…Each of her aquatic-inspired “organisms” is composed of discarded plastic detritus and visually comments on the damage done to species when they consume the glut of inorganic detritus hurled into our food chain.” In magnifying the petroplanktonic microbes that inevitably find their way into a whale's stomach, Rupp clarifies the irony of a food chain where the smallest organisms sustain the largest mammals along with the floating oceanic plastic waste that accompanies them into a whale's stomach. A similar statement is made with the plastic-stuffed wall works of Aquatic Larvae, with the paradox of young hatchling fishes nurtured in egg sacks populated by a buffet of accumulated microplastics.

 

In works such as her Pangolins and the series Remaining Balance Insufficient featuring aquatic mammal skeletons, Rupp bends and welds steel rods into graceful lines as effortlessly as if drawn on paper. The animal forms are then sheathed in innumerable, shimmering credit cards as they float jewel-like in the air. However, these pangolins and manatees are victims of environmental exploitation as they wrestle with human-caused habitat degradation. Rupp's visualization of their plight equates the debt incurred with their survival, leveraged against the temporary advantage of human exploitation. Made as they are of credit cards, this work reminds us that, unlike the world of finance, the biosphere is not man-made, and it's impossible to manipulate with numbers and percentages. Natural habitat is much easier to destroy than repair.

 

In addition to numerous sculptures, the exhibition features two giant digital prints on fabric that confront the emergency of non-renewable energy and plastic waste and their enduring damage to terrestrial systems. While these immense banners cannot ever be large enough to fully present this unfolding catastrophe, an abstract appreciation for the beauty of matter out of place is obvious.

 

As much as Christy Rupp's art is about ecological emergencies, she is informative without being didactic, while her playful wit and whimsical spirit convey the darkest news. However, her direct and accessible message does not come at the expense of aesthetics as the artist’s accomplished draftsmanship and percussive colors are at once delightful and dramatic. In visualizing the effects of ecological degradation, Christy Rupp does not pinpoint any single culprit – only because there isn't just one cause; rather, there is a collective complacency that permeates society. Anyone who views Rupp's work is engaged in some way as a citizen of a world in which it is easier to participate in a petrochemical-fueled lifestyle, blissfully ignorant of our burgeoning carbon footprint and impending doom.

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Events
  • STREAMING: Sculpture by Christy Rupp

    STREAMING: Sculpture by Christy Rupp

    Artist Talk and Reception January 18, 2024
    Understood as one of the early pioneers in the field of ecological art activism, the artist, activist and thought-leader Christy Rupp has an international reputation. This solo exhibition Streaming will feature a survey of Rupp’s intricate collages, wall installations and free-standing sculpture, which chronicle the ongoing tension between natural systems and the environment in transition, and call our attention to our interconnectedness with non-humans and habitat – transmuting detritus gathered from the waste stream through collage and sculpture to reveal what is hidden away from common view and understanding. Informed...
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Press release
ARTIST TALK : Thursday, January 18th, 2024 5:00 PM | Quick Center for the Arts
ARTIST'S RECEPTION: Thursday, January 18, 6:00 - 8:00 PM | Walsh Gallery
(Fairfield, CT- ) A survey of Christy Rupp's sculptures and works on paper is the subject of Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp. This exhibition features Rupp’s graphics, wall installations, and free-standing sculptures, which analyze intertwined systems of food politics and ecology that have become dysfunctional. In her sculptures birds, fish, mammals, and micro-organisms are fashioned out of detritus gathered from the waste stream: the single-use plastics, packaging, credit cards, discarded chicken bones, and bits of industrial debris that are contributing to crises precipitated by humanity’s callous treatment of nature. Informed by science and the historical representation of natural history, these works provide vivid representations of the contemporary geological era scientists have dubbed the Anthropocene in which human activity is now the primary driver of evolution and climate change.

There will be an Opening Night Lecture featuring Christy Rupp on Thursday, January 18, 2024, 5 pm at the Quick Center for the Arts, Kelley Theatre, and streaming on thequicklive.com
followed by a reception for the artist from 6 - 8 pm at the Quick Center for the Arts Lobby and Walsh Gallery.
Presented as part of the Edwin L. Wiesel Jr. Lectureships in Art History, funded by the Robert Lehman Foundation

Christy Rupp, Remaining Balance Insufficient, Life Sized Manatee Skeleton 2015 122" x 43" x 17" inches
About Christy Rupp: Christy Rupp is a conceptual artist and citizen scientist, who creates work informed by the study of animal behavior and habitat. Since the late 70's she has examined the relationship between waste and the environment through the lens of Discard Studies, or the study of the waste stream. Growing up in the Great Lakes rustbelt of the 50s and 60s, she became aware at an early age how our perceptions are framed as much by images of waste as they are of wonder.

Rupp was part of the artist collective Collaborative Projects (Colab)—organizer(s) of the historic Times Square Show—as well as ABC No Rio and other East Village-era artist groups.
She has received grants from Anonymous was a Woman Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation CALL Award, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, and Art Matters Inc. Her work has been recently shown at the Schunck Museum in Heerlen, Netherlands; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; The Butler Gallery at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, NYC; Zimmerli Art Museum; and ABC No Rio in Exile. This fall she will open a survey exhibition at UB Anderson Gallery, in Buffalo, NY. She has recently launched a career survey publication, Noisy Autumn: Sculpture and Works on Paper, published by Insight Editions, a division of Simon and Schuster

Christy Rupp lives in New York City and the Hudson Valley.
iinstallation of Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp at Fairfield University Art Museum's Walsh Gallery
 
 
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Virtual Exhibition

Understood as one of the early pioneers in the field of ecological art activism, the artist, activist and thought-leader Christy Rupp has an international reputation. Streaming will feature a survey of Rupp’s intricate collages, wall installations and free-standing sculpture, which chronicle the ongoing tension between natural systems and the environment in transition, and call our attention to our interconnectedness with non-humans and habitat – transmuting detritus gathered from the waste stream through collage and sculpture to reveal what is hidden away from common view and understanding. Informed by science and the historical representation of natural history, the artwork in this exhibition examines the way we frame our opinions of nature, using irony and wit to represent the human impact on our natural habitat.

Published by Fairfield University Art Museum, 2024

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