On Thursday, March 15, the Department of Art and its Visiting Artist and Scholar Series will present a lecture by artist and environmental interventionist Pam Longobardi. The artist, named Coastal Living Magazine’s Costal Hero of the Year in 2010, will speak about her ongoing Drifters project which addresses global plastic pollution and the changing ocean.
The talk will begin at 7:00pm in Humanities room 312.
Longobardi states “The ocean functions symbolically as the unconscious of the world, regurgitating all manner of human existence. The North Pacific Gyre acts as the eye of the ocean to record the human imprint as it gathers drifting debris in an area the size of Texas. The debris, originating from the shores of Asia and the Americas once naturally biodegraded at sea. But with the prevalence of plastic products, the waste floats indefinitely. As the flotsam circulates in the ocean, it collides with the Hawaii Islands depositing tons of plastic debris on its once pristine shores.
Drifters documents Pam Longobardi’s collection and presentation of these objects. Her actions are two forms of intervention. The first is an environmental intervention that physically removes the debris and resituates the objects within the cultural realm, their point of origin. The second form of intervention is a freezing of the object’s (de)evolution as cultural artifacts: they become frozen in different states of object-hood, from recognizable to wholly mutated. The objects are then re-presented in installations and large-scale sculptures as intriguing visual oddities that remind us of the impact of a globalized consumer society.”
Longobardi is currently Professor of Art at Georgia State University and has had over 40 solo exhibitions and 65 group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the US, China, Italy, Spain, Finland, Poland, Japan and elsewhere. Her artworks are in numerous collections, including commissions for Benziger Winery, the Hyatt Corporation, the Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport, Fulton County Medical Examiner’s Facility and First Tennessee Bank, Memphis. Her book Drifters: Plastics, Pollution, and Personhood was recently published by Edizione Charta, and in 2008 the film Drifters won Best Environmental Documentary at the 2008 New York International Independent Film and Video Festival.
If you have any questions about this event please contact Stephanie Smith at slsmith@westga.edu.
This is a first-time collaboration between Penley and Dr. Larry Frazier, the director of the opera workshop. Frazier approached Penley about working together. 
