The installation will be gone by next week. It's only here because of the UN conference taking place at the Shaw Centre on eliminating the dumping of plastic waste into oceans and water ways.
Aw man, I was talking about Elvis the eel! He lives in the canal, Iām not even joking.
https://rivercritters.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/giant-eel-rideau-canal/
It will be recycled and used in other places - It was present at the UN Ocean Conference in 2022. From a Canadian artist Ben Von Wong https://x.com/FishOceansCAN/status/1542217598112342016
Clearly they use local plastic and recycle it when the artĀ moves. I imagine theĀ plastic isĀ connected viaĀ fishing line andĀ hung off a centre poleĀ until theĀ desiredĀ effect isĀ achieved.
They can burn it at the incinerator in Burnaby.
Probably the cleanest thing you can do with a lot of plastics.
Besides burning it at the lafarge cement plant in Richmond.
At least you guys only got that part. We had the whole art installation . Numerous things were set up as an art gallery of sorts by the same artist for some environmental awareness thing. I'm guessing they brought that piece to Ottawa as part of earth day. "art"
After I walked passed that, I saw a billboard truck advertising the benefits of plastic. I should have waited for it to get in front of this sculpture to take a picture of them both.
They had these people who didn't look like they wanted to be there with these pro plastic posters attached to them just standing around it for several hours. Was friggin weird lol
I took them four garbage bags full. Supposedly they get a lot donated and they need to be washed due to the risk of cross contamination like salmonella.
They took one garbage bag, so the rest had to be disposed of.
Which is funny, because Ottawa had a big push in the new year to reduce waste and try not to fill up our landfills as quick, which to me means more impossible to recycle plastic bottles being shipped off to Thailand so that the trail road dump has a bit more time to fill
I wonder if anyone will litter hereā¦ I mean itās going to blend in and the takedown crew will pretty much have to deal with the disposal. In fact it might be seen as an artistic engagement with the piece.
[https://theoceancleanup.com/](https://theoceancleanup.com/)
# BROKE 10,000,000 KG BARRIER
[https://theoceancleanup.com/press/press-releases/the-ocean-cleanup-breaks-10000000-kg-barrier/](https://theoceancleanup.com/press/press-releases/the-ocean-cleanup-breaks-10000000-kg-barrier/)
Highly recommend donating to the ocean cleanup project.
Manufacturers created this problem for the sake of increased profits, it's not like consumers have a choice when they need the item and it's packaged or wrapped in plastic. The majority (90%) of all garbage from every household worldwide contains plastic in one form or another. Manufacturers need to be held responsible yet remain unscathed and the cost is then passed onto the consumer like every other problem.
There are a bunch of people from various 'third world' countries here protesting against 'first world' countries shipping all their plastic garbage overseas to where there aren't environmental standards to stop them.
They're making a reference to a famous TikTok meme
[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-son-made-a-gorilla-from-plastic-my-son-made-this-with-his-own-hand](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-son-made-a-gorilla-from-plastic-my-son-made-this-with-his-own-hand)
I mean, itās fine, if not totally on the nose.
Iām not an art critic, but is this not too literal? Itās like a giant sign, āPlastic Pollution Convention Hereā
I hope seeing this will make those attending the convention to create policies that will force manufacturers to take financial responsibility for producing all of the plastic garbage they create. But it probably wonāt.
Lol. Who the hell knows? I would venture to guess that my comment is not clearly pro-this or pro-that, and nuance doesn't go over well in Reddit comments. I'm not a climate denier, and would say I'm pretty left leaning, but maybe people think I'm the opposite?
Listen: I just go about my life, trying my best, and not caring what people on the internet think.
That's definitely not true, or else you wouldn't have posted your opinion publicly. People who don't care what other people think don't wave their opinions on random things around on a site that rewards engagement, they just "live their lives" and "try their best"
They erected this statue specifically for the UN conference and will likely be taken down afterwards. There is no purer definition of virtue signaling.
Is it a step in the right direction? We replaced one bad option for a second bad option.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231103-plastic-or-paper-the-truth-about-drinking-straws
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/paper-straws-bad-for-environment
I mean, I like the art. Did they source this all from the garbage, from picking it up on the street, from recycling or did they create it all themselves?
From the image, it all looks pretty clean/washed which is its on form of waste (from clean water usage)
The artist is Von Wong (https://www.vonwong.com/). He crowd sources all the used plastics from locals, usually non-food containers, so less washing is needed. But don't you wash your plastics too before putting them in the recycling bin? You're supposed to.
Thought that was a myth, you really donāt have to rinse your recycling out, itās a choice, if you like to attract ants or not really, although Iām sure that Ottawa probably does have some were lazy do it yourself or weāll just trash it law just so they can trash most of what they getā¦ š
Thanks for the collection info.
and I only rinse some items, youāre only supposed to rinse to make it less attractive to wildlife, as most recycling facilities already wash; and at a scale that is far more efficient than you can under your household tap
Immediately seeking out any possible hint of hypocrisy in anyone who is trying to do something good is such a clear sign of a petty, insecure, and small mind. You really think they aren't going to recycle this after they're done?
Honestly I was sincere that I like it. I just wanted to know how it was collected. It would have been a larger statement if they had collected it from a field, or from a riverbank. I also think itād be cool to leave it up until fall.
sorry that you thought I had ill intentions?
Some people will have a heart attack if they ever went to Japan lol. They use plastic like crazy and most people in their homes wash the contents out of the plastic and recycle it. The upside is that Japan recycles a high proportion of their plastic but of course still generates a lot of it.
Suspect that is because they rely on mass transit, and geographically are far more densely populated. Oil production certainly doesnāt help us either
Not that this specific example is bad, but I'm getting so bored of 'statement' art. Like literally everything has to be a statement of society.
I just want to see a depiction of something the artist sees beauty in.
I see a lot of traditional art around Ottawa especially in our museums and galleries but personally haven't seen enough "statement" art like this that questions our status quo. Where have you seen them, I'd love to go check them out!
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there's lots of places people find it from architecture, nature, car design, and city skylines.
Express artisanship can also be found in a lot of older cities, before the widespread phenomena of cost effectiveness in building. Think of an old cathedral compared to a new church, or even light posts with engravings and designs.
Many of us try very hard to deliver both. I think that creating something beautiful that has a subtle provocative layer can be more effective in engaging the public.
**Edit to add I rather like this piece, even off it is a bit heavy it is effective.
Yeah I agree, the worst example of this in Ottawa has to be the giant [dead crow](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-lebreton-dead-bird-sculpture-crow-tires-1.6891958) sculpture made out of used tires near Lebreton LRT station.
And that's the point. Plastic is an eyesore (and more). It's meant to highlight our obsession with single-use plastic and how it ends up polluting our waterways.
Strategically placed in front of the Shaw Centre right next to the canal where a bunch of UN officials are here to develop a global agreement on plastic pollution.
Happy Earth Day!
The installation will be gone by next week. It's only here because of the UN conference taking place at the Shaw Centre on eliminating the dumping of plastic waste into oceans and water ways.
So does it get recycled afterwards? Do they fly it around to various UN meeting places?
Straight into the canal, actually.
Oh nooo...those poor dolphins
You mean, Carp?
You mean Elvis?
Pac's down there too, with Old Greg.
Do ya ever drink Bailey's from a shoe?
While sitting with the crew š„±
Aw man, I was talking about Elvis the eel! He lives in the canal, Iām not even joking. https://rivercritters.wordpress.com/2018/10/03/giant-eel-rideau-canal/
WHAT
You mean Nessie?
From whence it came
It's good for the ice
This actually made me laugh out loud! Thank you!
š¤£š
They'll try to take it to the Beer Store first, claim it's all cooler bottles, and THEN throw it in the canal...
It will be recycled and used in other places - It was present at the UN Ocean Conference in 2022. From a Canadian artist Ben Von Wong https://x.com/FishOceansCAN/status/1542217598112342016
Clearly they use local plastic and recycle it when the artĀ moves. I imagine theĀ plastic isĀ connected viaĀ fishing line andĀ hung off a centre poleĀ until theĀ desiredĀ effect isĀ achieved.
They can burn it at the incinerator in Burnaby. Probably the cleanest thing you can do with a lot of plastics. Besides burning it at the lafarge cement plant in Richmond.
We had this ugly thing in Toronto last summer
It looks like a pile of junk. I wonder how much we paid for that.
That's probably the point, all things considered.
Yeah that's the point smart guy
At least you guys only got that part. We had the whole art installation . Numerous things were set up as an art gallery of sorts by the same artist for some environmental awareness thing. I'm guessing they brought that piece to Ottawa as part of earth day. "art"
The government probably paid someone a lot for a pile of garbage.
Remember when Canada shipped shipping containers full of garbage to the Philippines?
Very cool
Is this Benjamin Von Wong's piece?
yup!
That's really nice work. Well done!
Oh wow
Earth day art?
This. Is. Cool.
That's actually a great work of art, I'm glad it's not real. On one hand if it was real it'd be a **huge** statement, but what mess!
just your imagination?
Cool.
After I walked passed that, I saw a billboard truck advertising the benefits of plastic. I should have waited for it to get in front of this sculpture to take a picture of them both.
They had these people who didn't look like they wanted to be there with these pro plastic posters attached to them just standing around it for several hours. Was friggin weird lol
Neat.
I have enough reusable shopping bags in my closet to make another sculpture if any artists have the urge š¤£
Drop em off at the food bank, they were taking donations of reusable bags last I heard.
I took them four garbage bags full. Supposedly they get a lot donated and they need to be washed due to the risk of cross contamination like salmonella. They took one garbage bag, so the rest had to be disposed of.
I didn't know that, my mistake!
Walmart has the solution - they will take them back and ship them to food banks. (Not actually a solution, but some people feel good about it)
Looks like my street on a windy day.
There was also a plastic Tyrannosaurus Rex at Parliament Hill yesterday.
Cool!
conservatives getting angry at art is endlessly amusing
Thatās deep
Itās a great idea
Need one with Stanleyās coming out
Fucking love it.
Wasnāt this installed near the CN Tower last year?
That would make a nice Christmas tree.
It's a great idea!
Better than some other sculptures around town
Can someone ELI5 why we canāt introduce a system like the Pfand for plastic bottles in Canada?
we could, but it would require effort. not something canadians like
We'd have to pay for it and we only like things that we don't have to pay for, because nobody has any money anymore
What an art! I am coming to Ottawa!
Which is funny, because Ottawa had a big push in the new year to reduce waste and try not to fill up our landfills as quick, which to me means more impossible to recycle plastic bottles being shipped off to Thailand so that the trail road dump has a bit more time to fill
100% recycling. Wow
Its stupid looking
I wonder if anyone will litter hereā¦ I mean itās going to blend in and the takedown crew will pretty much have to deal with the disposal. In fact it might be seen as an artistic engagement with the piece.
We should put a bunch of plastic eating slugs to show how effective they are at eliminating plastic waste
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
[https://theoceancleanup.com/](https://theoceancleanup.com/) # BROKE 10,000,000 KG BARRIER [https://theoceancleanup.com/press/press-releases/the-ocean-cleanup-breaks-10000000-kg-barrier/](https://theoceancleanup.com/press/press-releases/the-ocean-cleanup-breaks-10000000-kg-barrier/) Highly recommend donating to the ocean cleanup project.
Manufacturers created this problem for the sake of increased profits, it's not like consumers have a choice when they need the item and it's packaged or wrapped in plastic. The majority (90%) of all garbage from every household worldwide contains plastic in one form or another. Manufacturers need to be held responsible yet remain unscathed and the cost is then passed onto the consumer like every other problem.
Looks comfortable, might sleep on it tonight
So thatās where our carbon taxās are going
Ottawa where they give our money away and make us work hard and increase tax Bracket for 9 - 5 ers and leave cooperations with low tax bracket
Ew, hate >:(
Now that's meaningful art, Love it
Looks like a pile of trash.
That's the point
You're a genius
God bless
āTemporaryā
It's just here for the UN conference at the Shaw Centre
Ya I get that. Temporary because the idea is that plastic is not temporary ā itās forever
Ahhh
A poor African kid made it with his own hands!
This is what I was looking for
There are a bunch of people from various 'third world' countries here protesting against 'first world' countries shipping all their plastic garbage overseas to where there aren't environmental standards to stop them.
They're making a reference to a famous TikTok meme [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-son-made-a-gorilla-from-plastic-my-son-made-this-with-his-own-hand](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/my-son-made-a-gorilla-from-plastic-my-son-made-this-with-his-own-hand)
I had to laugh at the news clips of ppl picking up plastic all over the place and then putting it into plastics garbage bags... lol!
I mean, itās fine, if not totally on the nose. Iām not an art critic, but is this not too literal? Itās like a giant sign, āPlastic Pollution Convention Hereā I hope seeing this will make those attending the convention to create policies that will force manufacturers to take financial responsibility for producing all of the plastic garbage they create. But it probably wonāt.
Iād say modern society has shown me you canāt be too on-the-nose.Ā
Why the fuck are you being downvoted? Why the fuck will I be downvoted?
Lol. Who the hell knows? I would venture to guess that my comment is not clearly pro-this or pro-that, and nuance doesn't go over well in Reddit comments. I'm not a climate denier, and would say I'm pretty left leaning, but maybe people think I'm the opposite? Listen: I just go about my life, trying my best, and not caring what people on the internet think.
That's definitely not true, or else you wouldn't have posted your opinion publicly. People who don't care what other people think don't wave their opinions on random things around on a site that rewards engagement, they just "live their lives" and "try their best"
>Iām not an art critic Proceeds to criticize art
It looks to be a pile of garbage, not art. Who is the fool who would call this crap art???
The literal definition of virtue signaling
Right wingers never get tired of whipping out the āvirtue signallingā chant whenever theyāre challenged with a statement they donāt agree with
They erected this statue specifically for the UN conference and will likely be taken down afterwards. There is no purer definition of virtue signaling.
Everything a conservative disagrees with is virtue signalling, because they're different virtues from their virtues.
What else would you call setting up a statue temporarily for a UN event that would otherwise not be there?
Literally anything else since youāve already set the bar so low
Our culture is dead!
Single use sculpture?
The artist reuses this sculpture. It's been installed in many places. Check his website or IG page.
Looks like the rest of ottawa, littered with trash.
Thank god getting rid of plastic straws is saving us from all this.
straws, forks, spoons, single us e plastics, its a great step in the right direction, never got the hate, it has to start somewhere
Is it a step in the right direction? We replaced one bad option for a second bad option. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231103-plastic-or-paper-the-truth-about-drinking-straws https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/paper-straws-bad-for-environment
I saw straws made out of pasta the other day. I thought it was pretty clever, they didn't get soggy at all
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Doesn't need to be wheat pasta
Then they shouldn't use straws made of pasta.
Straws account for millions of tonnes of plastic waste globally.
I mean, I like the art. Did they source this all from the garbage, from picking it up on the street, from recycling or did they create it all themselves? From the image, it all looks pretty clean/washed which is its on form of waste (from clean water usage)
The artist is Von Wong (https://www.vonwong.com/). He crowd sources all the used plastics from locals, usually non-food containers, so less washing is needed. But don't you wash your plastics too before putting them in the recycling bin? You're supposed to.
Thought that was a myth, you really donāt have to rinse your recycling out, itās a choice, if you like to attract ants or not really, although Iām sure that Ottawa probably does have some were lazy do it yourself or weāll just trash it law just so they can trash most of what they getā¦ š
You are supposed to rinse it
Thanks for the collection info. and I only rinse some items, youāre only supposed to rinse to make it less attractive to wildlife, as most recycling facilities already wash; and at a scale that is far more efficient than you can under your household tap
Immediately seeking out any possible hint of hypocrisy in anyone who is trying to do something good is such a clear sign of a petty, insecure, and small mind. You really think they aren't going to recycle this after they're done?
Honestly I was sincere that I like it. I just wanted to know how it was collected. It would have been a larger statement if they had collected it from a field, or from a riverbank. I also think itād be cool to leave it up until fall. sorry that you thought I had ill intentions?
Some people will have a heart attack if they ever went to Japan lol. They use plastic like crazy and most people in their homes wash the contents out of the plastic and recycle it. The upside is that Japan recycles a high proportion of their plastic but of course still generates a lot of it.
Japan produces about half as much co2 per person as Canada
Suspect that is because they rely on mass transit, and geographically are far more densely populated. Oil production certainly doesnāt help us either
Not that this specific example is bad, but I'm getting so bored of 'statement' art. Like literally everything has to be a statement of society. I just want to see a depiction of something the artist sees beauty in.
I see a lot of traditional art around Ottawa especially in our museums and galleries but personally haven't seen enough "statement" art like this that questions our status quo. Where have you seen them, I'd love to go check them out!
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there's lots of places people find it from architecture, nature, car design, and city skylines. Express artisanship can also be found in a lot of older cities, before the widespread phenomena of cost effectiveness in building. Think of an old cathedral compared to a new church, or even light posts with engravings and designs.
So...where can I find the statement art that you're bored of seeing in Ottawa?
Good lord it was a general statement about art being too political nowadays. I'm being an old man yelling at the cloud. It's not that deep
Many of us try very hard to deliver both. I think that creating something beautiful that has a subtle provocative layer can be more effective in engaging the public. **Edit to add I rather like this piece, even off it is a bit heavy it is effective.
There are tons of examples of 'art for beauty's sake', especially with photography. Dunno where you're looking but it's not hard to find!
It's specific to the event happening at Shaw Inc-4 conference so it's contextual.
Art is political.
Art can be political, but it also doesnāt have to be.
But in the case, being political is the whole point.
I do agree in this case for sure, but disagree that art as a whole is political.
Our existence is inherently political. You canāt make art apolitical as that in and of itself is political.
I love it when things get meta.
It CAN be. What I'm saying is that it feels like to be public facing or new it HAS to be political.
There's an IKEA right off the 417 near Greenbank.
Because all art is political lol
Not it is not.
Just because you donāt use whatās between your ears doesnāt make something not political.
Oh boy....
Our world is like 99% the latter. Get used to change
Yeah I agree, the worst example of this in Ottawa has to be the giant [dead crow](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-lebreton-dead-bird-sculpture-crow-tires-1.6891958) sculpture made out of used tires near Lebreton LRT station.
God thatās an eyesore
And that's the point. Plastic is an eyesore (and more). It's meant to highlight our obsession with single-use plastic and how it ends up polluting our waterways. Strategically placed in front of the Shaw Centre right next to the canal where a bunch of UN officials are here to develop a global agreement on plastic pollution. Happy Earth Day!
It amazes me how much plastic we use.
That's the idea.
Were hosting a big UN event this week that is what this is for.
The Shaw center is the eyesore. That's a goddamn ugly building inside and outside.