North Gateway Transfer Station Project
During the year that I worked on the North Gateway Transfer Station Project (Fall 2007-Fall 2008) environmental awareness hit a new high in social and political dialogs. For me this awareness took two major forms. Firstly, that the current rate of consumption of resources is unsuitable, posing a global environmental threat, and secondly that this same consumption pattern has weakened the world economy. Central to my understanding of this project is that looking at what we own and consume reveals something about our identity and culture, and that this examination underlines the importance of making thoughtful choices in what we do with these objects.
To create the images in the North Gateway Transfer Station Project I made nearly 6000 photographs of individual recyclables at a solid waste transfer and material recovery station in Phoenix, Arizona. I selected the objects at random from the incoming recyclables from the city’s curbside recycling program and photographed them isolated against a black background in an on-site lighting studio.
By sampling a relatively small amount of waste (5824 objects from an excess of 100,000 tons of recycling processed in Phoenix each year) and further narrowing the selection with keywords, consumer choices become more specific. The resulting images attempt to show particular objects, not the abstract understanding of the hundreds of millions of tons of waste created in the United States each year.
I entered the photographs into a database and gave them keywords from categories including material, color, and use. The keywords were chosen for a variety of reasons: their connection to categories of recyclables (paper, plastic, cardboard); the visual qualities of the objects photographed (red, orange, yellow); the use of the object (water bottle, toy); and personal interactions with the objects (kids’ drawings).
The database functions as an image-bank from which I create prints of selected image groups. The keywords used to generate these groups are chosen to create visual impact and highlight consumer choices. The photographs are displayed as grids with accompanying image overlays. The overlays are created by stacking and averaging the color and tone of all the individual photographs from each group. The resulting prints offer two alternative visual entries into the objects displayed. I borrowed organizational tools and aesthetic structures from contemporary advertizing (sorting all the plastic recycling by color and Macs new iPod Nano color scheme for example) and photographic practices.
Commissioned by the City of Phoenix through the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture’s Public Art Program.
