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.
Trashion at its best.
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.
Go! Take pictures and send them my way!
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…”
Never too late for a trash-themed Valentine. LOVE this tour of the shiny eggs via New York Shitty (blog name extra apt on a post like this).
Reminds me of an afternoon I spent in the area, marveling at the digester eggs and melancholy shoreline.
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.
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!
Semi-related post: Introspective trash.
What up, trashies?! Happy (belated) new year! Apologies for light posting in late 2011. Fear not, we’re back with some great stories about garbage and recycling in the works. First up: The Waste of the World is a five-year study funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. Unlike most research projects, which culminate in sleepy peer-reviewed journal submissions, this crew is putting on a multimedia art show called Everything Must Go.
Here’s the flyer description:
Everything Must Go follows the journeys of worn clothing as it is sold for reuse and recycling across the world. This exhibition brings invisible global waste economies into public view, explores the people involved and the impact these businesses have upon their lives, and questions our ability to control, contain and curtail waste.
The exhibition will feature a film, photos, workshops and a textile installation. Londoners can check out the event at the Bargehouse Friday 20–Sunday 22 January, 11–6pm. Free admission.
A gorgeous installation of faceted glass windows created by artist Duke Riley may now be seen at the Beach 98th Street A/S stop in the Rockaways.
Tugboat hauling a recycling barge.
Check out the full photoset on Facebook and the artist’s site for details on the symbolism, process and realization of this project.
The MTA drawings consist of several symbols local to the Rockaways. The left side of one diptych shows two images of a Piping Plover – an endangered bird that has chosen a section of beach at the Rockaways, just a few blocks south of the 90th Street station as one of its few remaining nesting grounds. The nautical flags spell out the popular phrase “Be Good or Be Gone” which can be seen behind the doors of several pubs and restaurants in the neighborhood. I am using the phrase as a reminder for visitors to take care and appreciate the fragile environment of the area.
This is a wonderful reminder of all the magical places the NYC Subway system can take you. Thanks for the tip, Gillian! Field trip anyone?
Remember those card catalog cards the Brooklyn Museum was giving away? Well, my librarian friend, Jennie, also scored a batch and put them to excellent use. At her beautiful fall wedding last weekend, we looked up our names to find our table assignments.
Card Catalog
My friend Myra models our cards
The happy couple
Congratulations Jennie and Ben!
Wooster Collective posted this Familia Gangsters video yesterday. It features the work of graffiti artist Mundano who uses the wagons of cartadores (pickers of recyclable materials) as canvases for his political murals.
For a closer look at this ongoing series, check out this flickr album.
And if you haven’t yet, please immediately buy, rent or stream the documentary Waste Land. It chronicles another trash-themed Brazilian art project in which photographer Vik Muniz enlisted cartadores to help create massive portraits of themselves using recyclables picked from a gigantic dump, then sold prints to profit their workers’ collective.
Last night I went to the opening party for The Palms, a pop up urban beach club featuring dumpster pools in Long Island City. The art, music and concept are a collaboration between the NYC groups behind many of the city’s most interesting semi-secret and heavily themed events. Despite the recent disillusioning discovery that dumpster pools are all made from newly constructed containers that have never held trash, I was psyched to check out the scene. I mean, just look at the teaser video, wouldn’t you be?
While it was cool to see the pools up close, they were built tastefully into a deck off to the side and overall, as an evening event, the party fell a bit flat for me. Paris Metro gawking rules applied, but I didn’t see too much worth staring at. One or two bold ladies danced in bikinis. Hipsters played what my friend Oriana of Brooklyn Spaces called “a vicious game of chicken” in the water. An obligatory gourmet food truck sold fancy fast food. The limited bar list included PBR and soju cocktails. House music pulsed, a lone breaker busted some moves. Maybe we got there too early. I just never forgot I was standing in a mostly empty parking lot in Queens. I think I would have been more excited if the pools were in the center of the space and distributed in a way that forced me to walk around them.
Anyway, in this final weeks of summer, I definitely see the appeal of just such a chic destination down the street from PS1. From what I understand the organizers plan to host semi regular daytime events until Labor Day. Local trashies, let me know if any of you go check out the joint for yourselves.
My favorite thing about this installation art project up now in Paris and beautifully documented over at inhabitat is the adorable typo in this video.
I met artist Tony Do at a picnic this weekend where we discussed, at length, crunchy rice dishes from our respective cultures (yum and yum) and, briefly, garbage and art (though never garbage art). It wasn’t until emailing after the fact that I discovered Tony himself is a trash artist, as evidenced by this conceptual upcycling of Douglas Huebler‘s famous piece.
Here’s what Tony has to say for himself:
The first generation of conceptual artists like Huebler attempted to de-materialize the art object by displacing it into language. One of the most important consequences of this form of production was the disruption of the process of exchange by which art becomes a commodity, and therefore the process through which art constitutes cultural hegemony. However, for various reasons the displacement of objecthood could not be sustained, resulting in the reintegration of materiality and the transformation of conceptual art into “post conceptual” art. This is where we are today. My intervention into Huebler’s seminal piece is a critique of his desire for pure objectivity (I argue that his displacement of the object is made possible through the sacrifice of subjectivity), and at the same time is a recuperation of his critical method. Through a gesture that is basically a form of recycling, my version becomes a critique of all forms of garbage–both material and conceptual art and as well as non art.
The upcyclers of Marion, Ohio, turned out for a local eco-art competition this week. Check out the winners.
Winning bottle lights, via Marion.com
everydaytrash 
