Bea Fremderman: Weeds Compared to Flowers

In a bay on the Atlantic Ocean, the tides slowly expose closed landfills littering coastal zones with Depression-era glass, soles of shoes, and conglomerations of inorganic and organic materials. Artist Bea Fremderman collects discarded detritus from this shoreline, imagining personas of those who may have used or cast the objects away.

After a deep cleaning process, Fremderman assembles her gatherings in a technique similar to that used for making stained-glass windows or Tiffany lamps. The sculptures are then internally illuminated, emanating the textures of their parts and refracting forms and color resulting in an immersive installation. These lit sculptures, with a new body of work, constitute Fremderman’s solo exhibition Weeds Compared to Flowers. Simultaneously, a grouping of her found-object sculptures are on view at the Art Preserve in dialog with JMKAC’s collection of artist-built environments.

Upon her first visit to the source site of the sculpture’s materials, Fremderman described Dead Horse Bay as the most apocalyptic landscape she had ever experienced. Once known as a site for industrial urban waste processing, storage, and incineration, the area came to hold levels of toxicity. Erosion gradually occurs on land beyond the shoreline exposing tree roots wrapped around bottles and seeping layers of waste.

The work is a link to place, and Dead Horse Bay signifies one example of an expanding landscape where our footprint contorts and is contorted by the environment.

Through the re-presentation and re-creation of waste, the work visualizes human interconnection with disposable objects, the Earth, and our unknown future.