everydaytrash

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.

Photo taken by dumpster

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!