For the last fifteen years, Kelly Jazvac has made artworks with plastic discards from the advertising industry, in doing so, she has developed a more sustainable way of making art. Jazvac is interested in linking the environmental ethic to the evidence present in these materials: that is, the human behaviours and attitudes that enable the climate crisis. This evidence is representationally, symbolically and physically embedded in the found photography that makes up the majority of her practice.

MOCA has commissioned Jazvac to produce a site-specific intervention for the North End Gallery. To create her work, Jazvac has acquired large-scale billboard images, which with a team of students she will manipulate to create a series of sculptural thresholds. While the original image/s will still be somewhat tangible, Jazvac’s transformation of the billboard will introduce new readings and concerns with which to negotiate.

Jazvac’s artistic practice literally and metaphorically expands how we relate to and understand the potential of photographic narrative to interrogate our relationship with images, consumerism and plastics. She reminds us all to look with a more critical eye at the quality and messaging of the imagery that surrounds us as she critiques our consumerist economy and through recycling presents an innovative way to continue working with the photographic medium.

Jazvac is a Canadian artist based in Montréal, Canada. She is part of a plastic pollution research team called The Synthetic Collective, which includes scientists, artists, art historians, philosophers and writers. Jazvac has exhibited internationally including at Musée D’Art Contemporain (Montréal), Museum of Modern Art (New York), Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Eli and Edyth Broad Museum (East Lansing), Ujazdowski Castle CCA (Warsaw) and FIERMAN Gallery (New York).