‘The Last Time I’ll Use Plastic’

Wyatt Bertz

May 3-25, 2025

Opening Reception: May 3, 6-9pm

Gallery Hours: Saturday and Sunday, 1-7pm, or by appointment

In “The Last Time I’ll Use Plastic,” Wyatt Bertz presents several new, flashy works that push consumer culture to a breaking point, made with epoxies, 3D-printed plastics, aerosols, and rhinestones.

"As a kid growing up in a monotonous suburb outside of Boston, I coveted everything colorful, plastic, and unnecessary—I was obsessed with sports cars, the drizzle on Dunkin Donuts specialty beverages, cheese-dusted processed foods, brightly-lit malls, pomeranians, advertisements, and other hallmarks of American capitalism. The walls of my bedroom were a collaged shrine to consumer culture - mostly cut from the pages of bling-era duPont Registry and various men’s health magazines - which to me, represented an escape from the boredom and repression I felt. Now as an adult stuck in an endless pursuit of awareness, and as an artist drawn to plastics and resins, I am reckoning with my relationship to these seductive objects, and the place I learned to fetishize them. 

"In the process of fabricating the pieces for this show, I became increasingly disgusted with their materials, which are drippy, shiny, incredibly toxic to work with, and produce lots of waste. For my own health, and my community’s, and the world’s, I make this naive promise: this is the last time I'll use plastic."

A 6-foot tall neon pink Holy Cross with 11 glittering, spinning wheels embedded with thousands of rhinestones, a small chair made of epoxy blocks containing 200 toy-sized fluorescent pink hot rods, and a pendant lamp covered in a rainbow swarm of Hot Wheels cars all reflect Wyatt’s interest in how the built world is wrought from, resembles, and ultimately returns to, the natural and spiritual worlds. A 3D video work features one of Wyatt’s original characters, an alter-ego wandering through a digital suburban environment while pondering questions of desire and existence.

Viewers can think of this show at Stephen Street as a last hurrah for all things processed, plastic, and suburban; an over-the-top relic of post-capitalist decadence, preserved forever - as if in a glacier, but in fact in petroleum-based transparent epoxy - as we yearn a new era of making and consuming.