Gracias Gracias Gracias Thank You Thank You Thank You Have a Nice Day Plastic Bag

Analia Saban has earned a reputation for playing with materials in ways that seem impossible. She has unraveled paintings, turning the threads of their canvases into a giant ball; draped concrete and marble slabs over sawhorses as if they were sheets of fabric; and used photographic emulsion as a pigment for painting. Prompted by the California ban on single-use plastic bags that went into effect in 2016, Saban’s series Paper or Plastic? extends that fanciful experimentation into the realm of printmaking. Working with master printers, Saban created a three-dimensional mold from a crumpled plastic bag and used it to generate a series of relief prints, each with a design derived from bags Saban collected from corner stores and bodegas in Los Angeles.