Abstract

This thesis examines the thirty-year installation and sculpture practice of New York-based artist Portia Munson (b. 1961, Beverly, MA) involving the collection and assemblage of discarded plastic objects of the same colour, specifically the Pink Project series. While her assemblage works of blue and green plastic trash present more obvious ties to plastic consumption and its detrimental impact on the environment, the Pink Projects series reveals the scale of the pink palette of products that become consumer waste, and enables an understanding of both the work’s subject and materiality as the abject product of gendered capitalist ideology. I consider four of Munson’s works that assemble pink plastic waste. This thesis argues that Munson’s work critically visualizes the paralyzing, overwhelming, and terrifying nature of our planetary predicament, while also enacting a feminist reparative ritual — drawing from the history of women’s altar-making, a feminist history of capitalism, eco-criticism, anti-capitalist philosophies, and depression studies. The transformative quality of Munson’s works hinge on their expression of the degraded and abject status–produced in the transition to and maintenance of capitalism–of waste and female body as productive spaces through which the unknown may be encountered and therefore from which the critical vernacular to address planetary chaos is produced.