Recology San Francisco, Art at the Dump Artist in Residence Exhibitions: Work by Benjamin Cowden, Ian Treasure and Hannah Quinn
The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco will host an exhibition and reception for current artists-in-residence Benjamin Cowden, Ian Treasure, and student artist Hannah Quinn on Friday, May 17, from 5-9pm and Saturday, May 18, from 1-3pm. Additional viewing hours will be held on Tuesday, May 21, from 5-7pm. Please note the new Saturday hours and additional Tuesday viewing time. Music will be provided Friday night by dj Joshua Pieper and on Saturday The Insufferables will perform. This exhibition will be the culmination of four months of work by the artists who have scavenged materials from the dump to make art and promote recycling and reuse.
Benjamin Cowden: Lunar Cassowaries
The cassowary, a large flightless bird, serves as a point of reference for Benjamin Cowden’s series of kinetic sculptures. Cowden’s works explore motion, flight, and wind-propulsion via unlikely combinations of found materials. Cowden has modified kites, umbrellas, and wind sails to make wing-like forms, but much like the cassowary, these winged creatures don’t leave the ground. They do, however, move or respond to human interaction—often in surprising ways. Cowden has harvested motion sensors from outdoor lights and novelty candles, and in combination with windshield wiper motors, tent poles, fishing reel gears and his own skillfully designed circuits, has created works that not only use, but generate energy.
Cowden explains, “In a society so focused on energy consumption, it seems especially fitting to re-purpose the detritus of that consumption not only into works of art, but into devices which in turn create their own energy.” Cowden’s sculptures also prompt us to think about our relationship to the natural world. The crafting of bird-like forms from the waste stream in turn poses questions about the waste stream’s effects on actual birds and other animals. Assembled together his sculptures appear like residents of a sanctuary for the rarest and most unusual of creatures. But unlike the cassowaries which are truly endangered and whose future is uncertain, these mechanical beings made with objects from the waste stream are here to stay.
Cowden received his MFA in metalsmithing from Southern Illinois University at Carbondate. He is an instructor at the Crucible in Oakland and has been an artist-in-residence at the Appalachian Center for Crafts in Cookeville, Tennessee and at Monochrom in Vienna, Austria.
Ian Treasure: Road to Nowhere
Commonplace symbols and objects so ubiquitous in our lives that we hardly give them a second thought are the subject of Ian Treasure’s work. In his sculptures and installations he employs repetitive forms and modern mechanics in tandem with the playful use of time and duration. Works have an anthropomorphic quality, demanding our attention with sounds and movements filled with personality. Humor and surprise are key components, but works also have an element of poignancy and provide space for reflection on the complexities, as well as absurdities, of life.
In Treasure’s Road to Nowhere a small toy taxicab travels on a never-ending journey. Less a feel good road trip than an existential expedition, the taxi rides along a conveyer belt highway, following an infinite dotted line. Unlike a car, symbolic of individual exploration and freedom, the taxicab speaks to relinquishing or losing control of the journey—be it in our own lives or on a larger, societal level. When placed against the backdrop of the dump, it can serve as a metaphor for loss of control over our consumption and its environmental implications. Treasure’s other works include a group of trouble-maker school desks and a liberated drum snare.
Treasure received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has been an artist-in-residence at the Djarassi Residency Artist Program in Woodside, California. He has participated in exhibitions in London, at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, and at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose, California.
Hannah Quinn: Beyond the Bower
During her residency Hannah Quinn has created functional works that reference the traditions of craftspeople and home hobbyists, while also exploring utilitarian forms. Quinn has scavenged wood of all kinds—from a skateboard maker’s scraps to legs pulled from old tables and chairs—to play with the shapes of benches, stools, ladders and other simple, yet versatile objects.
A homemade stool has served as the model for Quinn’s own series of stools. Years of wear and repair visible in the old stool point to a time when furniture and household items were not disposable commodities, and illustrate how this basic object functioned within the life of those who used it. Quinn’s stools—50 identical forms out of construction-grade lumber scraps— illustrate the abundances of modern life and pose questions about mass-production vs. the homemade. Her stools also pay tribute to the original object’s maker and caretakers, and act as blank canvases for future lifetimes of use and repair.
Quinn, who is an undergraduate studying furniture design at the California College of the Arts, identifies one of the motivations behind her work as the desire to create objects that promote human interaction. Quinn will also exhibit small found items as scientific specimens, highlighting beloved tools and oddball objects found in the discards from home and professional workshops.
The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco is a one-of-a-kind program established in 1990 to encourage the conservation of natural resources and instill a greater appreciation for the environment and art in children and adults. Artists work for four months in studio space on site, use materials recovered from the Public Disposal and Recycling Area, and speak to students and the general public. Over ninety-five professional Bay Area artists have completed residencies. Applications are accepted annually in August.
When:
Reception-Friday, May 17, 2013, 5-9pm
Reception-Saturday, May 18, 2013, 1-3pm
Additional viewing hours-Tuesday, May 21, 2013, 5-7pm
Where:
Art Studio located at 503 Tunnel Ave. and Environmental Learning Center Gallery at 401 Tunnel Ave., San Francisco, CA
Admission is free and open to the public, all ages welcome, wheelchair accessible.
http://www.recologysf.com/AIR/nextshow.htm
San Francisco Dump Artist in Residence Exhibitions: Work by Michael Damm, Julia Goodman and Jeff Hantman
The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco will host an exhibition and reception for current artists-in-residence Michael Damm, Julia Goodman, and Jeff Hantman on Friday, January 25, from 5-9pm and Saturday, January 26, from 1-3pm. Additional viewing hours will be held on Tuesday, January 29, from 5-7pm. An artist panel discussion will follow at 7pm at 401 Tunnel Avenue. Please note the new Saturday hours and additional Tuesday viewing time. This exhibition will be the culmination of four months of work by the artists who have scavenged materials from the dump to make art and promote recycling and reuse.
Michael Damm: Incidental Films for an Accidental Audience, On Tunnel
During his residency Michael Damm has created a new video installation for his ongoing series, Incidental Films for an Accidental Audience. In these projects, Damm uses rear projection to present site-specific videos at night in large windows or doorways along transit corridors. Geared to an audience of commuters or others who may serendipitously find the work, the installations present fleeting glimpses of familiar, yet nonspecific scenes of urban life, and reflect back the viewer’s own lived experience. Works serve as sites for cognitive disruption, momentarily shaking viewers from their mental routines and leaving fragments of images for the viewer to take away and puzzle out. At Recology, Damm will use a series of windows in the Environmental Learning Center at 401 Tunnel Avenue as his projection screen. The installation will be viewable throughout the month of January (excluding Wednesdays) from dusk to midnight.
Damm’s second installation work, viewable only during exhibition hours, uses images from a scavenged collection of slides taken by a photojournalist. Damm has layered multiple shots of specific scenes to create complex readings of past events and explore perceptions of time, history, and representation. The majority of photographs were taken at political events in the 1980s that have long receded from public memory. Deprived of their temporal context and documentary underpinnings these scenes of public diplomacy and governmental machinations become generically enigmatic instead of historically significant. Through the overlayering of multiple shots—each minutely different, yet of the same scene—Damm has created images that move into one-another and then quickly slip out of reach. Work captures the banality that surrounds the pursuit of the photographic “decisive moment,” while also speaking to the slippery nature of documentation in general, and how some events are historicized while others are relegated to the landfill.
Damm received an MFA from Mills College. He has exhibited widely in the Bay Area including at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and has exhibited in venues internationally including in Brazil, Germany, England, and Macedonia.
Julia Goodman: Rag Sorters and Star Gazers
Though Julia Goodman’s primary medium is paper which she makes by hand and uses to create sculptural forms, the vast offerings of the dump have inspired her to venture from this predominantly muted, monochromatic world and explore new materials and vivid colors. A found collection of water-damaged glass photographic slides, in combination with a personal interest in astronomy, has resulted in a body of work that references the power of the night sky. Resulting images are dreamy views of terrestrial scenes merged with celestial forces. Other works address ideas of navigation, and the role of the stars as literal and figurative guides.
In a separate body of work, Goodman returns to her paper-making practice and looks at the intertwined relationship women have had with rag paper over centuries—both as procurers and providers of the fabrics used in its production. Bringing a San Francisco focus to this history, Goodman interviewed a former Recology employee and learned that it was not until compactor trucks were widely used in 1964 that the city’s garbage collectors stopped gathering rags for recycling. Prior to this date, collected fabrics were brought to a room where female employees sorted them, doing dirty and difficult work. Having learned the names of several of these women, Goodman set out to honor them in her own papermaking practice. She replicated their process by sorting fabrics she had scavenged and then pulped the material. Using pre-1964 elegant fonts found in ephemeral materials such as Metropolitan Opera programs, Goodman recreated the women’s names in carved molds. She then pressed the pulped rags into her carvings to create her tributes. Elevated from their humble employment, Rita Bianchi, Maria Tringale, and Josephine Grosso’s names appear in grand style in Goodman’s paper relief works.
Goodman has an MFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and a BA in International Relations and Peace and Justice Studies from Tufts University. She has exhibited widely in the Bay Area and has participated in residencies at J.B. Blunk Residency in Inverness, California, and at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in Kona, Hawaii.
Jeff Hantman: Unassigned
Jeff Hantman combines a range of techniques and materials to create three-dimensional paintings that bow and bulge out from the wall. Hantman’s background as a woodworker informs his process which requires bending and shaping found materials, especially plywood, to create the rounded forms he uses as his canvases. Works are covered with materials chosen for their graphic or textual quality and then layered with his silkscreened and painted imagery. Signs of wear, stains, paint, and other remnants of the material’s previous use are incorporated into the pieces that are influence by deteriorating structures such as old barns or water towers, as well as personal memories of places and events.
While at Recology, Hantman has expanded his practice to include free-standing sculptural works. Now viewers can walk around his forms and view the frameworks that underlie his characteristic curved shapes, seeing interiors which are as visually compelling as their exteriors. Some works include a mechanical element, and the combination of this with Hantman’s weatherworn iconography results in sculptures that appear like obsolete contraptions or mysterious machines from a bygone era. Hantman describes these new pieces as the manifestation of childhood daydreams—fantasy objects built from the unlimited contents of the toy box that is the Public Disposal and Recycling Area. Much like his three-dimensional wall works that defy easy categorization, these free-standing assemblages provide space for interpretation rooted in imagination and memory.
Hantman received a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has participated in residency programs at Kala Institute in Berkeley and the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, California. His work is in the collection of the Alameda County Arts Commission.
When:
Reception-Friday, January 25, 2013, 5-9pm
Reception-Saturday, January 26, 2013, 1-3pm
Additional viewing hours-Tuesday, January 29, 2013, 5-7pm
Artist panel discussion-Tuesday, January 29, 7pm at 401 Tunnel Ave.
Where:
Art Studio located at 503 Tunnel Ave. and Environmental Learning Center Gallery at 401 Tunnel Ave., San Francisco, CA
Admission is free and open to the public, all ages welcome, wheelchair accessible. http://www.recologysf.com/AIR
San Francisco Dump Artist in Residence Exhibitions: Work by Tamara Albaitis, Amy Wilson Faville, and Calder Yates
San Francisco Dump Artist in Residence Exhibitions:
Work by Tamara Albaitis, Amy Wilson Faville, and Calder Yates
The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco will host an exhibition and reception for current artists-in-residence Tamara Albaitis, Amy Wilson Faville, and student artist Calder Yates on Friday, September 21, from 5-9pm and Saturday, September 22, from 1-5pm. This exhibition will be the culmination of four months of work by the artists who have scavenged materials from the dump to make art and promote recycling and reuse. A plant give-a-way will also take place beginning Friday on a first come basis. Plants have been rescued from the Public Disposal and Recycling Area and nursed back to life. Larger plants as well as propagated new starters will be available, one per visitor.
Tamara Albaitis: Dwell
When Tamara Albaitis has spoken to elementary school tour groups during her residency she often has asked, “What is your favorite sound?” Invariably someone will respond with the title of a song, and upon further prompting will understand that they are not being asked exclusively about music, but about the vast auditory experience that surrounds us every moment of every day. How sound figures in our existence can be a complex thing. It is the white noise soundtrack to our lives, but its ubiquity sometimes renders it outside our consciousness. Some people are acutely tuned in, while others hardly ever contemplate it, yet it is a human universal, rich with meaning and associations born deep within our psyches. Albaitis calls attention to this core sensory experience as a way to connect us to our environment and to each other through sculptural sound installations that combine the playful, visceral, primal, and poetic in unexpected ways.
Though Albaitis actually sculpts sound through its placement, movement and repetition, her main physical sculptural medium is speaker cones and wire. She has found these in abundance at the dump and has gathered countless yards of speaker wire and hundreds of discarded home stereo speakers from which she’s extracted the raw cones. Albaitis has crafted a large-scale, cocoon-like form viewers/listeners are invited to enter for an immersive auditory experience, as well as smaller sound sculptures. Reflecting her background in painting and drawing Albaitis uses speaker wire to “draw” on walls, one of many ways she explores the physicality of sound. Other scavenged materials have been incorporated into her work, including fur and leather, appealing to Albaitis for their role as protective skins, and various personal items that have emotional associations. She has also been inspired for the first time to use the speaker boxes she normally discards, stacking them for a sonic cityscape. Audio is drawn from varied sources including a found collection of CDs capturing sounds from space, field recordings of the Recology facility, voice recordings from scavenged cassette and reel to reel tapes, and Albaitis’s own heartbeat.
Explaining her sound installations Albaitis says, “Conceptually, these unfold as questions about sustainability (psychological and environmental), dependence, and the complex relationship between people and nature in a techno-centric culture.” A live performance with Delisa Myles (http://delisamyles.com) will take place during the exhibition receptions, Friday evening at 7:30pm and Saturday afternoon at 3pm.
Albaitis received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and attended the International Institute of Art in Hangzhou, China where she studied Chinese landscape painting. In 2003 she was invited to establish the first experimental sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she received the first MFA in sound art in the United States. She has been a recipient of a Eureka Fellowship and a James Irvine Fellowship and has exhibited nationally and internationally.
Amy Wilson Faville: Everything is Beautiful
During her residency Amy Wilson Faville has continued with a body of work that explores discarded materials. Prior to her residency she was painting public dumping sites in her Oakland neighborhood, and while at Recology she has chosen to work in mixed-media collage, capitalizing on the wealth of items thrown away to make representations of discarded materials from discarded materials. Faville seeks to turn the tables on the refuse—creating something beautiful from the abject—while also posing larger questions about consumption and sustainability. Says Faville, “To me, trash contains both narrative and metaphor. Stories are implied by things that are discarded and abandoned; heaps of cast-off belongings symbolize our economic decline and societal malaise.”
Faville’s working process first involves photographing her subject matter to create reference images for her paintings and collages. She discovered that photographing within the Public Disposal and Recycling Area (the dump) was challenging—objects moved through too rapidly as piles were quickly pushed by front loaders. However, individual piles of materials waiting to be recycled including mattresses, carpet, and damaged recycling and compost bins, sat longer for their photographs, so became the subject of her work. The resulting collage representations are rich with the repetition of form and line found in groupings of multiples. Faville’s titles for her pieces such as Mattress Canyon and Carpet Mountain speak both poetically to the enormity of the subject matter and ironically to its position as the antithesis of anything found in nature.
Faville’s collages combine a range of found materials including 1970s-era wallpaper culled from sample books, colored file folders, fabrics (including mattress ticking cut from her subject matter), and her own drawings. Faville gravitates to the vivid colors and bold patterns prevalent in 60s and 70s textiles, so in her work the dreary and bedraggled become vibrant, as we are invited to take a slightly psychedelic journey through these representations of accumulated objects. Pieced together colors and patterns also suggest quiltmaking, the domestic, and related feelings of comfort and familiarity. Faville will also present an assemblage of collected materials as a three-dimensional collage emerging from a wall of her drawings and other two-dimensional work.
Faville received an MFA and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, and Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and is in the collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco and the di Rosa Preserve in Napa. She is a faculty member at Diablo Valley College where she teaches drawing, painting, design, and color theory.
Calder Yates: Corpus Curare
Calder Yates has used the Recology San Francisco facility as a staging ground for video works, drawings, and mixed-media sculptures that explore disruption and precariousness, and the strategies employed in negotiating such conditions. Using lo-fi materials in stripped-down productions, Yates presents situations in need of navigation and efforts that have gone awry. With an undercurrent of implied danger and an often comical poignancy, works probe common feelings of vulnerability and powerlessness.
Gesture and movement are important components of Yates’s work. Previous projects have been participatory, requiring the navigation of chance situations, and while at Recology he has involved facility workers in similar challenges. His choice of mundane objects speaks to their universality while also adding an element of the absurd. Yates addresses the desire to make things better and the sense of futility that often results from our limitations as humans.
Explains Yates, “Specific experiences inform my approach. These include having lived in Florida and witnessing the aftermath of hurricanes and working as a teacher. There is a specific terror in recognizing that your attempts to ameliorate a situation would in fact lead to complicating the problem if not exacerbating the suffering altogether. And that’s what interests me.”
Yates is a graduate student in the sculpture department at the California College of the Arts. He holds a BA in political science and studio art from the New College of Florida. He has exhibited at the Vermont Studio Center and was the APAC Artist in Residence at the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida. Yates’s work will be on view at the Recology Environmental Learning Center at 401 Tunnel Avenue.
The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco is a one-of-a-kind program established in 1990 to encourage the conservation of natural resources and instill a greater appreciation for the environment and art in children and adults. Artists work for four months in studio space on site, use materials recovered from the Public Disposal and Recycling Area, and speak to students and the general public. Over ninety-five professional Bay Area artists have completed residencies. Applications are accepted annually in August.
When:
Reception-Friday, September 21, 2012, 5-9pm
Reception-Saturday, September 22, 2012, 1-5pm
Where:
Art Studio located at 503 Tunnel Ave. and Environmental Learning Center Gallery at 401 Tunnel Ave., San Francisco, CA
Admission is free and open to the public, all ages welcome, wheelchair accessible. http://www.recology.com/AIR
Art at the Dump – Newsletter – Issue No. 4
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Art at the Dump – Issue No. 3
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Once a month until June we will spend a Friday morning with a San Francisco elementary school here in our classroom making art from salvaged materials. Known as the “Art Lab” these events give kids free rein to make whatever they want from the materials provided, while also demonstrating that you don’t have to purchase supplies to make art—there are many materials around us that can be transformed with a little creativity.
We are very excited about the fabulous, large-scale installation former artist-in-residence Barbara Holmes has completed at 1045 Mission Street. This is the second exhibition we’ve programmed at the space and the first original, site-specific installation. Barbara has used the entire one-hundred-foot length of the room for her piece that is constructed from lath salvaged from the dump. The installation is viewable in the storefront windows 24-hours a day and a reception for the artist will be held Friday, March 23 from 5-8pm.
Article Profiles the Recology SF Artist in Residence Program
WEAD, the Women Environmental Artists Directory, has included an article about the Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program in issue #4 of their online magazine. Entitled, A Nexus for Art and Environmental Activism: The Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program, the article traces the history of the residency program and its role in bringing attention to important environmental matters. Included are the many artists who have addressed environmental issues in their residency work, as well as those with a social practice whose residencies have engaged community. The article illustrates how the residency activates artists, and demonstrates that even for those individuals whose work is not overtly environmental in focus, the residency experience has impacted their artistic practice and views about the environment and sustainability.
WEAD was founded in 1996 by Jo Hanson, Susan Leibovitz Steinman, and Estelle Akamine to use the unique perspective of women to further the field and understanding of ecological and social justice art through international collaborations. Hanson was the founder of the Recology Artist in Residence Program, and Steinman and Akamine both had residencies during the early years of the program. We are happy to continue our relationship with this organization which presents a distinctive voice on important issues effecting our planet.
Robin Lasser, Dining at the Dump, 2002, c-print, 31 1/2 x 29 1/2″ |
Recology SF Artist in Residence Exhibitions Jan 2012
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Terry Berlier: Even the Windmills are Weakening
Donna Anderson Kam: Beginning at the End
Ethan Estess: Stories from the Changing Tide
San Francisco Dump’s Artist in Residence Program Announces 2012 Residency Recipients
Recology San Francisco is pleased to announce recipients of artist residencies for 2012. The six selected artists are Beau Buck, Tamara Albaitis, Amy Wilson Faville, Michael Damm, Julia Goodman, and Jeff Hantman.The Artist in Residence Program at Recology San Francisco is a one-of-a-kind initiative started in 1990 to support Bay Area artists while teaching children and adults about recycling and resource conservation. Artists work for four months in a studio space on site and use materials recovered from the Public Disposal Area. Over ninety professional Bay Area artists have completed residencies. Applications are accepted annually in August.http://www.recologysf.com/AIR
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Fall 2011 AIR Show at the San Francisco Dump
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2011 San Francisco Carnaval Parade
Photos from the May 29th Carnaval Parade in San Francisco‘s Mission District. The Recology contingent included our award winning drill team and volunteers wearing costumes made by Recology San Francisco former artist-in-residence, Daphne Ruff. A beautiful day in San Francisco and a wonderful event!
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