KLEMM’S is pleased to present the group show Wanton Mobility, featuring international artists Alisa Baremboym, Keltie Ferris, Fiona Mackay, Molly Smith and Lisa Williamson, opening Thursday June 26th, 2014 from 6–10pm.
Recent media sensationalization of tragic events in international waters such as the hunt for the disappeared Malaysian flight MH370 in the Indian Ocean, the capsizing of the Costa Concordia in the Mediterranean Sea and the Japan Tsunami of 2011 (that washed tons of hazardous debris into the Pacific Ocean), have consequently highlighted the impact that increased and wanton travel, consumption, and energy use are having both on our local and global environments.
Spotlights on these events have not only featured reports on the immediate human suffering involved but have also, as an unforeseen side effect, drawn attention to the growing pollution and masses of floating waste adrift in the world’s waters. This abandoned debris is carried out by formidable currents and left to spiral around the vortexes of the oceanic gyres, slowly decomposing into a toxic plastic soup.
Wanton Mobility is an exhibition based on circulation, consumption, waste and accountability. The artists selected for this exhibition share common interests in current socio-political phenomena and the intimate experiences of cause and effect, focusing on how each element of production or creation informs the next. The art works included in this exhibition engage the transmutability of forms and memory, revealing the volatile and transient qualities of contemporary human relationships with material forms and coastal or oceanic ecosystems.
Like signifiers or signposts of past events, these uncontainable byproducts are also markers for an unknown future to come. The ocean is seen here as the ultimate circulating power – an unpredictable, commanding force, a giver, and a taker that carries the vestiges of our society. Abstracted expressions of horizon lines, circular forms and expanding or compressed systemic structures are the formal realizations of such markers.
Each work in the exhibition communicates the layered dimensions of lived experience through combinations of industrial vs. organic material output. Moreover, the works suggest how guiding symbols can inform the ways we understand and use that knowledge to relate to the fluidity of such networked environments as both producers and consumers.

– Arielle Bier