It’s nearly impossible to escape plastic usage. While the correlation between plastics and harm to human organs continues to be studied, our bodies and environment absorb and accumulate plastics in catastrophic ways. For A toxin threatens, but it also beckons, Chicago-based artist agustine zegers questions the aliveness of everyday toxins and our bodily porosity to them through the lens of single-use plastics. 

Within the exhibition, by-products of fossil fuels including paraffin, polymers, and polyethylene (the most mass-produced plastic) are fragmented and recontextualized through visual and olfactory means. “Plastic brings a noxious pleasure into our everyday lives, one that binds us with extractivism through its protective sheen,” zegers says. zegers presents new, small-scale works that expand upon the desire and abjection of the polymers that surround and compose us. Polymer puddles with microplastics adhere to windowpanes. Found plastic bottle caps are filled with fragrance meant to resemble the intense scent of petroleum extraction in a landscape.

A toxin threatens, but it also beckons borrows its title from theorist Mel Y. Chen’s essay “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections,” which delves into the dynamics of human-generated toxicity and biopolitics—the connection between life and political power to govern individuals and populations. zegers stages the exhibition as a petri dish that invites viewers to closely inspect the production and consumption of polymers through sight and smell.

ABOUT

agustine zegers is a Chilean olfactory artist and student of atmospheric biopolitics. Their work attends to the nourishing and noxious transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, offering forms of communion with ecological collapse at the scale of the molecule and breath. They have scented and exhibited at venues such as: The Venice Biennale, 52 Walker, Prairie, Center for Performance Research, and Sharjah Art Foundation.

agustine zegers

Support for A toxin threatens, but it also beckons is provided by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the School of Art & Art History, the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, and the University of Illinois Chicago.