Sunday, August 14, 2011

New Work

I am looking forward to some solid studio time hopefully soon. I have been photographing for the past few weeks, I now need to look at this new project before I make some decisions. I have been photographing the trash in the dumpsters and the alley behind my house. For a time I focused on why we keep our possessions and I am still intrigued by how people make those choices why inanimate objects carry such importance. However, since moving to Denver I have been amazed that particularly the alley behind my block is filled with furniture and mountains of trash every week. A few things play into that, there is a mix of socioeconomic backgrounds in the neighborhood, as well as I believe people come from the next town over and dump illegally into our dumpsters creating more trash than what could possibly come from this small block radius.
I hope to set up a time lapse camera in the next month to capture even more changes. In the meantime I have been photographing everyday till about a week ago. Looking and observing for what as changed from one day to the next.

I was intrigued when I watched the film Waste Land by the artist Vik Muniz, http://www.wastelandmovie.com/ his project documents the world's largest garbage dump, Jardim Gramacho located outside of Rio de Janeiro. He collaborates with the pickers to recreate photographic images of themselves out of the garbage/recyclable materials they collect. A very powerful film and the images are beautiful. It was interesting to see how another artist who I admire dealt with trash in a completely different way.