Kelly Jazvac is a Canadian artist born in Hamilton, Ontario, and based in Montréal. She has a long-standing sculptural interest in waste materials such as plastic. Given that each body of her work derives from discarded objects, such as advertisements, plastic debris, diseased wood, or broken car parts, her aesthetics and imagery adapt to what is found in trash. Consistent themes include how waste can be evidence of the instrumentalization of the environment, living beings, and ecosystems under global capitalism, and how that subjugation could be reframed, redirected and reimagined.
Jazvac is also a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, a plastic-pollution research team that includes scientists, artists, art historians, philosophers, and writers. The group’s work highly influences her artistic practice, and results in co-authored scientific papers and curated, eco-responsible, exhibitions.
Jazvac has exhibited at The Musée D’Art Contemporain (Montréal), The Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Eli and Edyth Broad Museum (East Lansing), Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw) and FIERMAN Gallery (New York). Her work has been written about in National Geographic, e-flux Journal, Hyperallergic, Art Forum, The New Yorker, Canadian Art Magazine, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her co-authored, collaborative art/science research has been published in scientific journals, including Nature Reviews, GSA Today, and Science of the Total Environment. She is represented by Galerie Nicolas Robert and FIERMAN Gallery and is a Full Professor at Concordia University's Studio Art Department with specialties in Sculpture and sustainable material practices, social/environmental justice, art/science collaboration, and critique pedagogy.