Tegan Moore

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PERMEATIONS OF A DATASET
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In Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through
The Art Museum at the University of Toronto
September 08 - November 20, 2021.
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Factory reject “mystery foam” sheet with anti-static agent, hail-damaged polycarbonate roofing, photodegraded corrugated plastic, plastic pellets, plastic fragments, biodegradable starch packing peanuts, mulberry paper, salvaged phone and sound track (6 min looped)

Permeations of a Dataset is both a sculpture and data visualization of a plastic pollution study by the Synthetic Collective to survey industrial plastic pellets in the Great Lakes shoreline sediment. Using a one-to-one scale, it references a 1 x 10 metre quadrat used to sample from an area of the shore. Each of the 7,268 plastic pellets included in this piece were collected by hand from a quadrat of city beach in Sarnia, Ontario. Each pellet has been measured and visually described in a slow manual process, reanimated here in a form emulating a strand line, the interface between land and water where debris is deposited on a shore. Moore’s quadrat is composed of layers of found building and packing materials, which show a range in the effects of time and exposure, from puffy and supple, to rigid, photo-oxidized, and fragmented.