By Max Liboiron I love mould. It is invisible, yet suddenly visible if you let it take over parts of your fridge or bathroom; it can come back from the dead; it is neither animal nor plant. It is mysterious and beautiful. To that end, here are some artists who use mould as a medium […]
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People are making more waste than ever before. The desire to luxuriate and waste is part of human nature. Humans are inherently wasteful. We’ve heard it before. But I doubt it. So I did an experiment: Rubbish Topographies is a landscape made of donated trash. Although the pile of tea bags and cardboard may bring to […]
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Picking up discarded items from the curb can be tricky, even in a city as practiced as New York. Who wants to risk hauling a TV down three blocks and up four flights of stairs to find out it doesn’t work? Or what if that nice side table has bedbugs? Luckily, artist Sarah Nicole Phillips […]
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The Wellcome Collection in London, part of the Wellcome Trust, opens an exhibit this Thursday, March 24, that explores changing attitudes toward dirt and cleanliness from the seventeenth century to the mid-21st. The show is built around specific examples in six different places — Delft, London, Glasgow, Dresden, New Delhi, and New York. It runs […]
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Material for the Arts in New York has been an inspiration and catalyst for creative reuse across more than three decades. A collaboration between the city’s Departments of Cultural Affairs and Sanitation,* MFTA connects unwanted stuff with eager arts and education organizations. Under the savvy leadership of Harriet Taub, objects that would otherwise become part […]
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My good friend Dan Fenellon, known to many in the digital design world as “Wavedog” (http://www.wavedog.com), needed to build a wheelchair ramp at his home for his son, Brooks. Brooks has a disability that required him to be in a wheelchair for some time; however, due to his own efforts and the help of a […]
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Max Liboiron contributes this post about a specific and luminously beautiful garbage-art — and its devastating implications. Liboiron is a scholar, activist, and artist engaged in work that is deeply relevant to the themes of the Discard Studies project. She is joining the blog as a regular author, so will soon be posting under her […]
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At the end of September I took a four-day workshop called ‘Care and Identification of Photographic Materials,’ sponsored by the Metropolitan New York Library Council. We spent hours scrutinizing daguerreotypes, albumen prints, Polaroids; we gauged qualities of finishes – high gloss? dead matte? – and colors of deterioration (purplish-red or yellowish-brown?). Our teacher, Gawain Weaver, […]
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Prolific Canadian artist Max Liboiron has a new show at the AC Institute in New York through October 16. Called The New York Trash Exchange, it creates a tiny world from cast-offs, then invites viewers to take it away piece at a time — so long as they replace what they take with something of […]
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It’s a website, it’s a book-in-progress, it’s an extraordinary work about the men and women of New York’s Department of Sanitation. Lisa Dowda and Liz Ligon have spent two years hanging with, interviewing, photographing, and learning the ways and lives of the men and women who pick up the Big Apple. The images and stories […]
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