St. Louis-based artist Libby Reuter has made environmental advocacy an integral part of her art practice. Trashin’, seen in the exhibit The Mighty Mississippi at the Missouri History Museum,was created from detritus found along the river that was discarded on the land and washed into storm sewers, creeks and connecting rivers. We tend to take for granted the clean,plentiful water that comes from our taps, but pollution, aging infrastructure and droughts from climate change underscore how fragile our watershed really is.
A natural offshoot of WatershedCairns, a collaborative project by Libby Reuter and the photographer, Joshua Rowan, shown at the Missouri History Museum in 2014-2015, Trashin’ very directly and painfully illustrates the consequences of our rampant use of convenience plastics and our disregard for the natural environment and our watershed. Look closely at the sculpture, and you will see a multitude of plastic: drinking and motor oil bottles, bags and straws, Styrofoam packing materials and cups, pool floats, orphaned flip-flops, gas cans, a rake, the back end of a duck decoy and a cooler, all found in or near our local rivers.
To construct this sculpture, Reuter partnered with a number of environmental organizations including Operation Clean Stream, a program of the Open Space Council of St. Louis, Living Lands and Waters, and Missouri River Relief, who actively work to collect and properly dispose of trash that has found its way into our rivers. From their cleanup efforts, Reuter sourced the materials for the sculpture and worked with Missouri History Museum staff to build the mobile.
Trashin’ is linked to Watershed Cairns, an expansive collaborative project in which Reuter constructs beautiful sculptures by stacking household and antique glass vases, bowls and bottles into “cairns” (markers), which are placed in watershed sites along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Her creative partner Joshua Rowan, then documents these temporary installations in the landscape before they are removed, leaving no trace. The team uses the resulting photographs, which are beautiful works of art in themselves, and the sculptures to create exhibitions that are shown alongside educational texts about the Mississippi River basin and its plight. Collectively, this body of work calls attention to the sometimes hidden watersheds and their critical state, but it is also meant to instill an emotional connection with, and appreciation for, the beauty of the land.
To date, Reuter and Rowan have placed and photographed Cairns in over 300 locations across the Mississippi-Missouri River basin.Reuter’s sculpture Trashin’ is a call to action—to create an awareness of, and to improve our practices for our great waterways. The Mississippi-Missouri River basin is one of the world’s largest watershed regions, covering about 40 percent of the continental United States; serving irrigation for 92 percent of agricultural exports and providing 50 million people with fresh drinking water.
The watershed—its rivers, tributaries and creeks—are the veins of our central region. Everything we discard without care on our streets and our land eventually finds its way to the river and ultimately into our oceans where, as recent science has indicated, it breaks down into micro-plastic particles that end up in our food stream and, ultimately, in our bodies. Hanging above the viewer like a Sword of Damocles, Trashin’ reminds us all that we need to change our habits.
From an essay by Olivia Lahs-Gonzales. Olivia Lahs-Gonzales is an independent curator, writer and artist, based in St. Louis. She wasDirector of the Sheldon Art Galleries for seventeen years and Assistant Curator, and CuratorialAssistant in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Saint Louis ArtMuseum for nine years. Lahs-Gonzales has exhibited her personal work in St. Louis, Chicago,London, Taipei and Tokyo.