Shari Mendelson & Miranda Fengyuan Zhang

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River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to announce a two-person exhibition of work by Shari Mendelson and Miranda Fengyuan Zhang in collaboration with Mildred’s Lane in Narrowsburg, NY.

Both Mendelson and Zhang work with discarded materials, reclaiming the excesses of commercial production through deliberate studio processes. They begin with an act akin to foraging, exploring local and social spaces for material waste. Found materials are transformed in the studio using a combination of assembly and aggregation. Through their work, both artists probe what the detritus of a particular moment in history may reveal about its culture, people and history.

Mendelson works primarily with plastic containers found along upstate roadsides and the sidewalks in Brooklyn–reworking everyday consumer waste into sculptures that evoke Classical Greek and Roman vases, Islamic glass, and terra-cotta artifacts. Mendelson cuts, collages, and paints her source material, transforming plastic surfaces into a luster that appears to be ceramic or glass, obscuring entirely its quotidian origins. Mendelson’s practice offers a new mythology for our contemporary civilization in distress–through which small acts of attentiveness and imagination can eclipse overconsumption and environmental neglect.

Miranda Fengyuan Zhang’s knitted works comment on the scarcity and the surplus of her chosen material, yarn, at disparate historical moments. Presently, Zhang splits her time between Shanghai and New York–two hubs of the fashion industry, a sector which generates an estimated 92 million tons of textile waste annually. Zhang procures yarns from friends who work in fashion production, knitting dissimilar fibers info into formal, gestural compositions that are then stretched like paintings. Her fascination with industrial excess emerges from a story from her family history that is in stark contrast. In the early 1970’s, a period of extreme economic hardship in China, Zhang’s grandmother taught herself to knit clothing for her young children. Yarn was extremely scarce, so as the children grew older, she would unravel their clothing and combine the reclaimed yarn with scavenged material to create new articles for them to wear.

Both artists approach their materials through a broad lens of history, exploring how the substance of everyday life affects our individual selves, our community, and the planet. These ambitions resonate with the contemporary archeology projects at Mildred’s Lane, in which buried debris found at the Beach Lake, PA site is sorted, catalogued, and at times, incorporated into installations. Each of these artistic endeavors provoke reflection on day-to-day material choices and the long-lived effects of momentary consumption.