Breath

"Breath" depicts the suffocating grip of plastic's pervasive impact on our planet while also presenting an example of creative reuse of plastics, one of many solutions to the global issue. A quilt created from plastic shopping bags highlights the striking array of vibrant colors inherent to polymers. Notably, the quilt retains the mandatory warnings labels from the bags, emphasized by audio of hastening breathing.

  • Mafe Izaguirre
    Sound
  • Mafe Izaguirre
    Editor
  • Project Type:
    Experimental
  • Genres:
    Experimental, environmental
  • Runtime:
    1 minute
  • Completion Date:
    October 30, 2019
  • Country of Origin:
    United States, United States
  • Country of Filming:
    United States, United States
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography

Artist Pauline Galiana was born in Algiers and grew up in Switzerland and then France. She received her MFA at ESAG (now Penninghen) in Paris in 1984, and holds a Christie’s Art Business Certificate. Her work has been exhibited at the New York Public Library; Memorial Sloan Kettering Gallery Brooklyn; Kentler International Drawing Space in Brooklyn; the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; Drawing Rooms Art Center, NJ; Durham Arts Council, NC; Islip Art Museum, NY; New York Institute of Technology; ChaShaMa Gallery, NYC; Robert Henry Contemporary Gallery, Bushwick; Baron Boisanté Gallery, NYC; Ramis Barquet Gallery, Mexico; FSU Museum of Fine Arts, Tallahassee, FL; Stadtmuseum Deggendorf, Germany among others. In 2017 she was selected for a one-month artist residency at MassMoCa in North Adams, MA. Her work is included in the collections of UBS, New York University, the National Museum of Romanian Literature, where she won a 2018 Bibliophile Object-Book Biennale award, and private collections in New York, Washington, Houston, Paris, Riyadh, London and Sydney. She lives and works in New York City.

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Director Statement

I work simultaneously on distinct bodies of work, from collages to paintings and drawings, from ephemeral installations to small-scale sculptures, performances, and videos.

Presented here, the "Fantastic" series delves into the intricate relationship between human consumption, convenience, and their impact on nature, labor, and the natural cycles of time. Each artwork is meticulously crafted from ubiquitous plastic debris, transformed through labor-intensive techniques such as slicing, hand-stitching. This painstaking process elevates the value of a material typically prized for its convenience and low cost, revealing its hidden potential and beauty.

Within this series of works, the six Fantastic videos place repurposed plastic in striking, often surreal scenarios, contrasting it with a natural environment such as water or trees, to underscore the tension between human convenience and environmental harm.