January 16, 2013 6:30 – 8:15pm 199 Lafayette Street, Third Floor New York City Just past Spring at Kenmare—and upstairs from La Esquina! A choreographer finds beauty and grace in garbage trucks and, against the odds, rallies reluctant city trash collectors to perform an extraordinary dance spectacle. On an abandoned airport runway, two dozen sanitation workers—and their […]
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RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) is a young yet accomplished project located within a construction waste recycling center in Philadelphia. They have twelve hours left in a fundraising campaign to open the trash-stream residency program to applications from artists in the Spring of 2013. They hope to hire staff with the money and become a […]
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Yes, that’s a painting! Long ago (and on into today), explorers and anthropologists sought to capture images of the disappearing worlds they found. Similarly, Artist Valeri Larko memorializes (on canvas) the ruins and structures of the everyday disappearing urban/industrial landscapes around her. Her bio records that she is “best known for her densely painted landscapes of […]
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By Max Liboiron The “universal” recycling symbol was designed in 1970 for a competition during America’s first Earth Day. A large producer of recycled paperboard, the Container Corporation of America, sponsored the competition. The winner was Gary Anderson, an urban design student in California, who said that he designed the symbol as a Mobius strip, […]
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By Max Liboiron We all know waste doesn’t go “away.” We know about landfills, transfer stations, blue boxes, and ocean plastics. We know special types of waste, such as nuclear waste, has similar infrastructure, but imagine that infrastructure is somewhere “away.” Or is it? Repository: A Typological Guide to America’s Ephemeral Nuclear Infrastructure,is a 42-card […]
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By Max Liboiron The Surfrider Foundation’s mission “is the protection and enjoyment of oceans, waves and beaches through a powerful activist network.” As it turns out, that means most of their work has to do with discards, waste and pollution. Litter, oil spills, wasting water, plastic trash, and chemical runoff are some of their primary […]
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There’s a show up at New York City’s underappreciated Museum of Art and Design. Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design includes “works that deal with issues such as the ephemeral nature of art and life, the quality and content of memory, issues of loss and disintegration, and the detritus of human […]
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WasteDiversions: Sculpture and Collage from New York’s Waste Stream March 29 – October 4, 2012 Opening reception March 29, 6-9 pm MFTA Gallery is pleased to present WasteDiversions: Sculpture and Collage from New York’s Waste Stream, an exhibition of new sculpture and collage by artists from MFTA recipients Culture Push and Vaudeville Park, as well as […]
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By Max Liboiron A lot of discard issues are about scale. Scale is expressed in functions of measurement or computation, yet scale is more than a quantitative sum. Scale is always relative (“bigger,” “smaller,” “less than,” “twice as much,” “a quarter of”), and therefore relational. So scale is not merely about being big or small. […]
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Burning Trash By John Updike At night—the light turned off, the filament Unburdened of its atom-eating charge, His wife asleep, her breathing dipping low To touch a swampy source—he thought of death. Her father’s hilltop home allowed him time To sense the nothing standing like a sheet Of speckless glass behind his human future. He […]
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Discard Studies 