From Caryn Aasness’s exhibit at GLEAN Portland.
I am, admittedly, maybe a little too fascinated with landfills and dumps and trash transfer stations and garbage and refuse and recycling and other questions of sustainability and waste, and what we consume and keep and throw away.
So when I saw that an acquaintance of mine was an artist-in-residence at the local dump, I had to go see her exhibit.
Malia Jensen and I grew up near the same small town in western Oregon, although I'm a few years younger and don't remember meeting her in Willamina as a kid. But our parents knew each other; many woodworkers and potters lived in that part of Oregon in the late 1970s and early 80s when there was something of an art scene in the foothills of the Coast Range. Malia and I reconnected a few years ago, at random, when she was looking for editors for her Nearer Nature project, which pieced together video footage of wild animals encountering salt sculptures she placed throughout Oregon.
Malia's work and that of four other artists is on exhibit now as part of the GLEAN Portland program, which gives artists money and time to make things from what they find at the dump. (Otherwise known as the Metro Central Transfer Station in Northwest Portland.)
Many of you may be familiar with this kind of art from Jenny Odell, the artist who wrote the book "How to Do Nothing." Odell also had a residency at a dump, but in San Francisco. There, she created an conceptual exhibit from things she gleaned, called the "Bureau of Suspended Objects."
It turned out many people wanted to acquire curated objects discarded at the dump as no longer useful – things like rotary dial telephones and bank ledgers from the early 1900s. The label "trash," Odell wrote, is "an individual emotional decision that more often than not is completely divorced from the material reality of the object.”
"Of course we should learn to recycle, but we should also learn simply to look at our own objects, and carefully," Odell added. "Doing so might lead to the (inherently, if subtly, anti-capitalist) recognition of the symbolic function of objects – and the ways in which they all too often form the physical collateral of changing desires and circumstances."
Malia is a sculptor and video artist, not a found object artist, and she told me it took awhile to figure out what to create from her time at the Portland dump. Her vision began to take shape when she gleaned some discarded bricks. She carved the bricks into soft-looking organic forms that defy the familiar, rectangular shapes she found in the garbage mounds.
She was also excited to find a discarded bag of Lincoln 60 powdered clay. From the clay, Malia created a large replica of her first-ever sculpture, a cat she made when she was 12. That was the year her parents split and Malia left our shared hometown. "Retracing the actions of my small hands using my grownup hands was a surprisingly emotional excavation of memory," she wrote in a statement that accompanies her exhibit.
From Malia Jensen’s exhibit at GLEAN Portland.
Malia's cat sculpture on display at the gallery is a memoir of a moment in time, with several sedimentary layers of being and meaning embedded within. Before it was deemed trash or carved into a sculpture, the clay she found at the dump was part of the earth. Someone was paid to extract it and to package it and to transport it in a way that it could be sold. ($11 for 50 lbs.) Then, someone purchased the clay, but never used it. Eventually, the clay became unwanted. Someone disposed of it at the dump. There's no evidence of who discarded it or why it showed up the day Malia was there. But someone got rid of a bag of clay of marginal resale value, most likely because it was taking up too much of their own physical or psychological space.
As the clay exists now, it's a beautiful object displayed in a gallery in a former warehouse in Portland's Pearl District. As a piece of art, the sculpture has a new life cycle. Someone will buy it because it means something to them. Perhaps they will understand its history. But a moment will also arrive in the sculpture's future life cycle when a new owner does not know of all the layers. They will merely see a skillfully rendered sculpture of a cat by a well-known Portland artist. They will covet it as an object for their own reasons.
I own one of Malia's pieces. It's a brick she made, stamped from a mold she rescued from the Willamina brick factory, which was exactly what its name implies: a brick kiln in the place where we both lived for a time as children. Malia's Willamina brick is a play on the term of a "bricked" phone; it has a space carved underneath it where you can hide your phone to keep from looking at it while you do deep work. Not only is it a useful object, but it’s interesting to look at.
I would very much like to also own one of the amorphous bricks Malia carved during her GLEAN residency (see below). One of them would make for a good companion piece to my Willamina brick. They would sit on my bookshelf as a commentary on form and childhood and distraction and the human capacity to make interesting and useful things from the earth.
From Malia Jensen’s exhibit at GLEAN Portland.
But this is where I'm forced to admit to some physical collateral of my own that holds me back from a new art purchase. It's in the form of a $111 monthly credit card charge for a storage unit about a mile away from my home. The unit contains a few items left over from the big clean out of my father's workshop, the stuff of his life as an artist I didn't throw away at the dump. I've sold off everything else my father made, with the exception of 20 wooden urns. (The kind you put ashes in after someone dies.)
I'm a writer, not an accountant, but from what I know of balance sheets, the psychological cost of storing these urns has exceeded any material gains from their future sale. Even I know it's a shocking waste of money to spend $1,332 a year to store symbols of death. And yet I cannot have them or their energy in my home, especially in the attic. I keep telling myself that if I can sell the urns, the proceeds will cover the cost of storage the last few years. But selling the urns requires me to take good photos of them, and then for me to cold call funeral homes who might consider buying them. I have until now been willing to pay $111 a month to avoid those tasks.
If I ever sell these urns, they will be purchased by someone who wants to store ashes in a lovingly crafted wooden box for a time, maybe a generation. But then what? How long does an urn – and the ashes within – have sentimental or decorative value? How many generations before the urn and the human remains are also discarded in a landfill, ashes to ashes, dust to dust?
I've started to consider making some art with these urns, something inspired by both Jenny Odell and Malia Jensen and video artists I admire. Maybe I will film myself taking the urns to the dump, flinging them onto a vast mound of other objects defined as useless, and recording the sound of the crack of the wood as it splits open on the pile. I could document myself trying to sell the urns on Facebook Marketplace, discounting the price over and over again until I'm just giving the damm things away to whoever will take them off my hands in some macabre Buy Nothing group. Perhaps I could scatter urns around Portland to the various free piles that pop up on corners. Then I could watch with my camera. Would anyone take a free urn? And why? Would the gleaners be willing to tell me on camera why they coveted such an object, found on the street?
Writers are always picking up found objects and tossed aside scraps, so maybe like the grubby little gleaner I am, I'll just keep writing about the things we cannot discard. Even if they cost us $111 a month.
Love,
Erika
From Willie Little’s exhibit at GLEAN Portland.
THE NEWS
All the links…
For those in Portland, the GLEAN exhibit continues through Feb. 25. The gallery is open from 12-5 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. It's in the Maddox Building at 1231 NW Hoyt St.
Your yoga pants link of the week is a resale store I'm very excited to have just learned about, also here in Portland. Sometimes workout clothes just don't, uh, work out for your body. Leggings roll down. Sports bras don't support. It's good to know you can upcycle such objects at Revive Athletics.
One of those stories I wish I'd written: The rise of climate anxiety therapy, reported in the NYT from, yep, Portland. (The folks quoted in this story should definitely avoid the emotional minefield that is the dump.)
I taught the movie "Don't Look Up" in my communication class. Despite the mixed critical reactions, I enjoyed the film as a climate change analogy. Yeah, it's kind of a messy movie, but it was funny and a perfect way of talking about a number of communication theories. (Including metaphor and mass media and agenda setting, which are terms my students should have learned in my class recently.) None of my students knew the word "Anthropocene," which dismayed me, but it also reminded me that we don't know what we don't know until we know it. However, they were intrigued by the concept of the Anthropocene. They also liked learning about a "hyperobject," which is something so big and overwhelmingly complex (like climate change) that you can study and think about it, but you can't always see it directly. Maybe some of you will be intrigued by these concepts, too?
I'd like to see a photo of your father's hand-crafted urns. Maybe donating them to a hospice organization would be a good way to go, since hospice providers are in touch with loved ones coping with costly end-of-life decisions, and some of those families might like that special donated gift free of charge.