ART RECYCLES NOW
Recycling is a form of re-interpreting.
Art is, in its essence, a recycling project. The artist takes a set of materials and ideas, revisits them with reconsidered concepts, and repurposes them to create something new. Any media can be recycled or upcycled, whether it’s physical, like paint or marble, or notes, digits, letters... or whatever.
Today, we’ve taken a look at artists that have created some new recycled masterpieces.
Collage: Paola Bazz
While most collages are basically made of 100% recycled bits and are predominantly paper-based, we love finding new approaches.
Paola Bazz recycles magazines and newspapers by first folding their pages into small squares and applying them to the canvas, cardboard, or wood, as if they were 3D pixels.
Collage: Paola Bazz. Face 3. 2012-2013
Her unique collages are both intricate and vague. They recycle obsolete media. Her recent Face series, with its pixelated recycled bits, is reminiscent of Chuck Close paintings.
Bazz selects previously used paper, based on its thickness and color. She applies the pieces to a rigid mathematically conceived grid. It is an orderly method for organizing the chaos of images, messages, colors, and culture.
Photo: Courtesy of Rio +20. Recycled Bottle Fish Sculptures by Adriana Rostovsky.
Like two fish out of water, the glowing fish statues on Botafogo Beach in Brazil are made out of recycled plastic bottles, lit from within by LED lights. They were originally created by Uruguayan artist Adriana Rostovsky for the United Nations Conference of Sustainable Development last year.
Art Piece: Adriana Rostovsky. “Between Corsica and Dublin.”
Since she was a child, Rostovsky used to collect things most people tend to throw away, like tea bags, gum wrappers, postcards, bus tickets, empty toy boxes, to name a few. Later, when Rostovsky was an architecture student, she became interested in projects that utilized recycled materials and began to see them as a creative medium.
“Re-Imagining Past Possessions: Works of Recycled Materials,” a recent exhibition at the transFORM Art Gallery, co-curated with Elisa Contemporary Art, in New Rochelle, NY, featured Rostovsky and four other artists’ works focused on environmental consciousness.
Sculpture: Carole Eisner. Bird Song.
Another artist, sculptor Carole Eisner, also featured in the transFORM exhibition, recycles wasted materials, including fragments of historic buildings, bridges, gears, tools, automotive parts, and scrap metal.
Sculpture: Carole Eisner. Valentine Two.
Eisner assembles these iron and steel scraps, welding together pieces of what our society has left behind, giving them new purpose -- to both remind us that we need to deal with the environmental problem and to show us a beautiful possibility.
Collage: Zac Freeman. “Justin” 2013.
Artist Zac Freeman recycles bits of junk, from buttons to circuit-board fragments, and assembles them, in an edgy Pointalism adaptation, to create collage portraits. The faces are beautifully rendered, like a Chuck Close gone geek.
Freeman never modifies the junk pieces. Instead, he simply combines and layers them onto a wooden canvas, leveraging their relative sizes, textures, and colors. His work is especially fascinating in that it represents societal changes through objects and technology, as well as the trash generated, as we endlessly move on to the endless stream of next versions.
Painting: Anna Bradfield. Brooklyn Dumpster Painting.
Even dumpsters can be recycled into works of art. Artist, Anna Bradfield creates paintings on their surfaces, as well as on other found objects. Some of Bradfield’s pieces turn trash into treasures, while others reclaim lost beauty.
Photo: Chris Jordan. Cigarette Butts.
If only it was true in real life, that cigarette butts could turn into magnificent thick healthy forests instead of leaching toxic chemicals into our soil, contaminating our water, and poisoning wildlife.
Photographer Chris Jordan makes it happen in his recent work, using 139,000 butts, arranged, in Seurat fashion, to render the image of a gorgeous stand of spruce trees.
Photo: Chris Jordan. Crush Cars in Tacoma. From Intolerable Beauty Series.
Jordan also created a body of recycled art works as part of the Intolerable Beauty Series, including a stunning piece, "Crush Cars in Tacoma."
Collage: Mary Ellen Croteau. Shells, Oil Spill.
Seurat is summoned again, this time in larger points of color, comprised of discarded plastic bottle caps. Artist Mary Ellen Croteau created “Shells, Oil Spill,” a massive piece, measuring 8’ x 4’, using over 7,000 caps that would otherwise have polluted the planet.
The caps are fitted together tightly, like a mosaic, so that none of the underlying white board shows through. Croteau was inspired by an image she found on the internet of sea shells in an oil spill in China.
Read more about Recycled Beautiful, as it relates to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact in our posts throughout this week, including The Most Beautiful Redux, Mind Blowing Recyclers, and Ancient Recycled Flavors Now.
Get busy and enter the BN Competitions, Our theme this week is Recycled Beauty. Send in your images and ideas. Deadline is 11.24.13.
Photo: Courtesy of InterActiveMediaSW.
Also, check out our special competition: The Most Beautiful Sound in the World! We are thrilled about this effort, together with SoundCloud and The Sound Agency. And we can’t wait to hear what you’ve got!
