Over the weekend, AfriGadget shared this wonderful short documentary by the Kenya-based Dutch journalist Ruud Elmendorp on trashpicking craftswomen near Nakuru.
The women, including Lucy Wambui, featured in a video and report on Elmendorp’s site, collect plastic bags from the dump and weave them into marketable goods. In an area of the world ravaged by poverty, HIV, domestic abuse and drug addiction, these women are bettering their lives and educating the next generation on the income they earn selling recycled plastic. Lucy, for example, pays her grandson’s school fees with part of her income.
I find this piece particularly compelling because I have been to Nakuru, spent the night in the national park for which the area is famed and even spent a night in town without ever crossing paths with a community of trashpickers. Elmendorp’s shot of the dump site with flamingo lake in the background beautifully illustrates the contrast between the two worlds. It reminds me of this photo, which I shared here in 2010, taken from the shore of the same lake.
Lake Nakuru
How different the planet appears from the other side of the looking glass.
I thought Decorative Dumpster Day was over, but then this evening, while flipping through an art magazine, I discovered this magnificent piece by the Japanese-born, LA-based artist Kaz Oshiro.
Kaz Oshiro's Dumpster (Flesh with Turquoise Swoosh) 2011
The photo appeared in the fabulous Walker Art Center‘s monthly magazine as part of a feature on a new show called Lifelike. According to the Walker website, “Lifelike invites a close examination of artworks based on commonplace objects and situations, which are startlingly realistic, often playful, and sometimes surreal.”
Check out an interview with the painter/sculptor here. My favorite bit is Oshiro discussing his choice of media:
If you know the construction of a painting, you have a wood frame and you stretch canvas over it. So that structure is kind of important, and you can’t really go beyond that. The objects I’m making are boxes. If you see the conventional painting frame, it’s kind of thin. But in my case, wood stretcher bars become a box and then I stretch canvas over it.
I’ve been making trash bins and dumpsters for awhile. Sometimes I’m not sure why. Somehow I’m really attracted to it. You see dumpsters everywhere in the United States on the street. I drive around town. In LA, I have to drive everywhere. Somehow I always see things on the street, and everything’s coming from my memory.
Why I paint them? First of all, I like the shape of the metal big box. You see all kinds of marks on it. The [form of the] dumpster allows me to paint the way abstract painters do. That’s one of the things I like about painting dumpsters. To me, it’s existing between representation and abstract painting.
Perhaps my favorite decorated dumpster story of all time is this one via inhabitat. German trash collectors turned dumpsters into pinhole cameras to take stunning photos.
Dumpster camera
It’s a twist on decorating a dumpster, rather than dressing it up, they transformed waste receptacles into beauty-making machines.
May 1st is Decorative Dumpster Day. Each year, my colleagues in trash Little Shiva and Ruby Re-usable and I take a day to post photos of and reflect upon the containers in which we store our waste. Today our sites everydaytrash.com, The Visible Trash Society and Olympia Dumpster Divers will share links from our own collections and maybe a few from around the blogosphere. Happy DDD!
My kick ass friend and fellow blogger Oriana of the amazing site Brooklyn Spaces has a lovely “honorary Brooklyn” post of right now featuring Austin’s Cathedral of Junk.
Cathedral of Junk
Looks like a magical place and yet another reason I need to get to Austin.
“The question we must ask ourselves is who and what are waste?”
My friend, Myra, sent me photos of a show she spotted while attending a conference this weekend at Hampshire College. And of course, this being the future, online video tells the story best.
Click here to find out more about this innovative work reimagining dumpstered skateboards, discarded plastic water bottles and countless other materials we sometimes think of as waste. I wish I’d taken a Design, Art and Technology class as an undergrad!
Remember this sweet chandelier? I just learned that it’s coming to NYC for Earth Day!
Chandelier in Toronto, 2009
I have to say I get MANY, MANY Earth Day pitch emails, usually covering general green topics not directly linked to trash and most pimping a for-profit product. So I was extra thrilled to get word that a public art project I have admired from afar. It goes up tomorrow, here’s what the press release has to say about the installation, which opens tomorrow (I added the links):
A 21-foot tall sculpture in the form of a chandelier made of recycled plastic containers will hang above the World Financial Center Winter Garden’s famed marble staircase for an entire month starting on April 15th.
From April 15th through May 11th, visitors to the ten-story glass-vaulted atrium will be able to look up and see artist Katharine Harvey‘s stunning Chandelier, a 21-foot tall and 15-foot wide sculpture consisting of thousands of used plastic containers laboriously washed and strung together. The artist has transformed water bottles, sandwich trays, muffin tins, salad boxes, egg cartons, and more into a symbol of luxury and opulence while simultaneously commenting on the glut of plastic in consumer society.
And here’s more about the artist, also from the press release:
A resident of Toronto, Canada, Katharine Harvey, represented by Nicholas Metivier Gallery, is known for creating sculptural installations that refashion plastic packaging and dollar-store items into startlingly beautiful works of art. Her paintings, light displays, and sculptures have been featured in galleries and public installations throughout the world, including the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, the Vancouver Winter Olympics, Nuit Blanche Festival in Toronto, Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., Le Centre d’Exposition in Baie-St-Paul (Québec), and the Painting Center (New York). Group shows include the Galerie Art Mûr (Québec), Art Gallery of Regina, Saskatchewan, as well as residencies at Ivavvik National Park in the northern Yukon (2006) and The Banff Centre in Alberta (2003).
Local trashies, send photos and comments if you go check it out for yourselves. I plan to stop by sometime this week.
Garblogging would be a somber pastime if not for all the fun and creative people out there making incredible things out of trash. Seeking playful cheer in your life? Follow Haute Trash on Facebook. Trashtastic fashions made from whimsically reimagined materials.
Since 1999, Singapore’s only landfill has occupied a portion of the island of Pulau Semakau. To draw connections between this removed resting place of trash and the daily lives of the people who contribute to it, artist Zinkie Aw took a series of dustbin portraits.
Photo by Zinkie Aw
She calls the series the “Republic of Pulau Semakau” as each depicts a person holding a wastebasket in front of his or her face. In her words: “The things we throw away tell us so much about who we are.”
This whimsical project hits a chord for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that my own interest in trash began as an interest in my local island landfill.
Know how I found out about Zinkie’s work? The everydaytrash.com Facebook page. You, too, can discover neat new things there. Fan the page, and while you’re at it, fan the Republic of Pulau Semakau page, too.
Mark your calendars and polish your hitchhiking thumb, it’s that time of year again. What time of year, you ask? Well, time for the good people of Beverly Mass. organize a wondrous community event called the Trashfinder’s Ball, a benefit for the local farmer’s market, now immortalized in a documentary film.
A trophy made from trash will be awarded to the person bearing the best “trash find” and there will be a catwalk to strut your stuff in recycled fashions. If you’re anywhere in the area, it’s Saturday, March 31, 2012 7:00PM at the Franco-American Club, 44 Park Street, Beverly, Mass.
Early into my trash blogging career, people started to send me links to photographer Chris Jordan‘s work, which over the years I have turned over into several posts. This latest link (thanks, Chelsea!) is a talk by the artist himself, describing how he strives to help the viewer visualize incomprehensibly large numbers, and to “make global issues personal.” Check out what he has to say about his work and what a replica of Van Gogh’s Starry Night made of 50,000+ discarded cigarette lighters has to do with the Pacific Gyre. It’s a frightening tale of the consequences of plastic. As Jordan puts it, ”This is the Earth’s alarm system going off…”
Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11am-2pm, artist Gwyneth Leech sits inside the glass walls of the Flatiron Prow Art Space drawing on used coffee cups. The other night, my friend Phillip and I went to see the film The Artist after which he walked me to the Subway stop just in front of the Flatiron Building. It seemed perfectly appropriate to stumble onto such a whimsical project after seeing such a whimsical film.
Photo taken by Phillip on his phone. Thanks, Phillip!
The best description of this project (as well as lots of great photos and descriptions of the artist’s other work) can be found on her blog, Gwyneth’s Full Brew in the form of this conversation with a passerby as she was outside wiping finger, nose and palmprints off the windows:
A man came up to me carrying his takeout coffee (small brown cup, flat lid, wrapped in a napkin).
He asked rather belligerently, “What exactly is the point of this installation?”
I drew breath. He actually looked kind of angry.
“Well,” I said, “it is about the inventive potential of the human spirit. The artist has saved all her used paper coffee cups for years and she has drawn and painted on each one by hand. There must be almost 800 cups hanging in there. And each one is a different.”
“Oh!” He said, and stalked off, apparently satisfied.
The website for the art space says the artist would be sitting inside the prow through December 31, so I’m not sure if the live drawing element of the installation is still in progress or if this is the finished product. I kind of like not knowing. The stack of used cups not yet decorated beside a chair and a bunch of colored markers is a quiet reminder of the endless supply of disposable canvas we generate in this city, this country, this world…
Over the course of 10 months, Brooklyn-based artist Willis Elkins collected nearly 2000 cigarette lighters from the shorelines of New York City, documented, photographed and mapped them.
Lighters
Elkins, who describes himself as being “very interested in all facets of consumer culture, product disposability and the waste infrastructure,” has a number of other interesting projects on his site LESS logs. Less stands for Locate Explore Synthetic Sites.
The lighter project in particular reminds me of Norwegian artist Jon Gunderson‘s contribution to the 2008 “Through the Looking Glass: From Found Object to Trash Art” show curated by Samir M’kadmi (and opened with a keynote by yours truly, still one of the coolest opportunities every brought on by everydaytrash). Gunderson presented a series of found briefcases each filled neatly with objects found on walks through Oslo. He had a case filled with pacifiers, one with cigarette lighters and another filled entirely with black shoe soles.
Oslo art show
Somehow organizing these everyday objects in cases and putting those cases on a row of podiums elevated their status from trash to art with social commentary. Elkins’ projects do the same. Check them out!
