Albertus Gorman, “Big Jug Rainbow,” 2015
Working with materials that have washed up on the banks of the Ohio River, Albertus Gorman makes site-specific installations.
Naturally (or unnaturally) plastic bottles comprise a lot of what he finds there. By rearranging bottles in a given area, he highlights their out-of-placeness in ways that are jarring, but fun.
Everything about these containers is so highly artificial that they contrast with all the greenery around it. So much thought and effort went into the design of these bottles to make their intended contents as desirable as possible. That part worked because these plastic bottles were consumed in large numbers and many of them found their way carelessly into the Ohio River.
-Albertus Gorman
Three more of Gorman’s bottle sculptures, after the fold…
Albertus Gorman, Untitled (green bottles boat dock), 2015
What I could see was a “wealth” of green plastic soft drink bottles that lemon/lime carbonated beverages come in. So, I walked around the mound and boat dock and collected all the green bottles I could find. In the interest of full disclosure…there are also a few green glass bottles in here, but 95% of them are plastic. My idea was to activate this area by massing all the green bottles I could collect and store them “inside” the boat dock.
Albertus Gorman, “Yellow Concentrate,” 2015
Individually, all these yellow plastic containers barely registered scattered across the debris field, but it’s a different story when you bring them together.
Albertus Gorman, “The Disquieting Rainbow“, 2015
This is another in a series I have been calling “Petroleum Rainbows”. I started with the wooden bench I found in the immediate area and set it up near the riverbank in the willow habitat. I gathered all the brightly colored items I could find tangled in the driftwood and sitting on the sandy beach and of course most of them are made from plastic.
See also: Discarded Containers in Modernist Arrangements, Bottle Beach and Good to the Last Drop
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