Presented by KODA and curated by Jennifer McGregor, Sari Carel: A More Perfect Circle, is the first public art commission at Lentol Garden in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Exhibited in the garden are a series of ceramic sculptures inspired by the single-use coffee cup, a ubiquitous object that brings into focus people’s daily experience of interacting with trash. The installation connects our personal encounters with disposable objects to the wider systems that fill our lives with waste. The Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center in Brooklyn co-presented the project, hosted selected programs, and exhibited a behind the scenes look at the project in display cases.

A More Perfect Circle is informed by research I conducted in collaboration with Nicholas Hoynes, a PhD student in Environmental Sociology at NYU. Together, we surveyed employees and patrons of local coffee shops about their daily experience with single-use objects. Their research uncovered a sense of powerlessness and conflict about a choice at the center of a daily routine. What happens to that daily, single-use plastic-lined paper coffee cup when you toss it in the trash can, and why do we take it for granted?

For me, the dilemma of how to address the single-use issue intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic when local restrictions limited the use of reusable thermoses for the potential public health risk. Carel saved her own coffee cups, which became objects of study as they piled up in her studio. observing this stackable form with its inherent intimacy, an object that is held, sipped from, possessed momentarily and then discarded, is the model for the collective objects that take center stage at Lentol Garden. A More Perfect Circle is conceived to give attention to the time we spend with the cup during its life cycle.

The project at Lentol Garden featured ceramic forms reminiscent of Brancusi’s Endless Columns.  Sculptures are modeled after disposable coffee cups stacked, alternatingly, end-to-end or rim-to-rim. Ceramic pieces in the shape of plastic cup covers—and glazed to evoke pie charts drawn from our research—hung from the interior fences of the garden. The handmade, intentional, and individualized quality of each unit contrasts with the mass-manufactured coffee cup that inspires this project.

The historian Susan Strasser discusses how trash is about sorting, classifying, and categorizing, and how these processes have an inherently spatial dimension. This project explores discard practices through sculpture and  how private and public realms negotiate with each other. Approaching these accumulations through the visual and material, through art, reduces the judgment and ick factor that usually comes with trash and aims to open up a sustained conversation and field of play on how we can change the world around us.

Photos by Argenis Apolinario