The exterior is painted in an array of pastels—rose, sky blue, sea foam green—and one window facing Dickinson Street reads in paint, “Evolution Arts Collective.” Inside, a series of white-walled rooms adorned with art leads to a back-room studio floored with concrete, housing a kind of scaffolding.
People are bustling around, placing tags at the corners of frames, putting the final touches on the buffet spread—plenty of Green Goddess dip and smoky vegan bean spread, as well as pigs in blankets and a cookie plate. They are harried but kind. They’re excited to be there.
On April 18, the Collective debuted its first-ever recycled art show, according to co-founder Kim Roberts, in honor of Earth Day.
“Honestly, we’ve talked about it for years,” Roberts said over the phone before the show. “We just decided having a recycled art show … near Earth Day would be a good idea.”
Speaking about the show, Roberts touched on the preparations the Collective made to prepare for a recycled art show.
“We had enough people, I had enough work, we know a couple of people and I also did a call for art on Craigslist.
“I would love to do [the show] every year,” Roberts said.
Roberts, who has run the Collective since its inception in 2008, is no stranger to the concept of recycled art, which stems out of her belief in sustainability.
“Recycling and composting and sustainable living … is kind of what I’ve always been into,” Roberts said. “I hate the idea of landfills being filled when you could use the stuff for something else. So it’s just natural for me to make artwork out of things that have already been used for something else.”
Indeed, Roberts observed her own art, for the most part, is de facto recycled.
“I do a lot of mosaics and I make earrings out of game pieces, and I also make feather earrings, cause I have chickens, so I like that whole local theme too.
“Can’t get more local than art supplies in my backyard!” Roberts added with a chuckle.
The only stipulation of the Collective’s show was that the finished product be at least 50 percent recycled. Besides that, it was anything goes, Roberts explained.
For the most part, the artists embraced the theme and made their recycling very explicit. Ben Zwank, for his piece "Remember," took a canvas, arranged a host of objects—butterfly cutouts and cylinders—and painted over it with a profusion of rainbow pastels. Artist John Pahlas, in his piece, “Perched in the Balance,” took recycled steel and fashioned it into a tree crowned with a sharp-yet-fluid crow, beak agape, roosting in mid-screech.
“This is stuff that is really beautiful, contemporary and it’s not antiseptic at all,” said Evolution associate and fellow artist Daithi—pronounced “Dah-hey,” it’s Gaelic for “David”
“We’ve really got some amazing art. It was really great what people came up with.”
Daithi himself contributed two pieces to the show, both what he called “assemblages.” The first piece, “Beyond,” featured a canvas lightly embellished with materials ranging from paint, rust and turquoise to a bundle of hay tied with a thick rope.
“I created this kind of little alter of transitions in life; and how we each have chapters and how we kind of develop and grow through that,” Daithi explained.
The other piece, “Chimes,” seemed to spring from a very different state of mind: Resembling a wall clock, the piece looked dilapidated and apocalyptic between the somber coloring and the opossum skull that adorned the top, but also stored a great deal of beauty on its shelves, between a clay bamboo tile and an iridescent butterfly wing, among other effects. And yes, there were chimes hanging from the bottom. Beautiful-sounding wooden chimes.
“Art is life and it comes from many different ways,” Daithi said. “Everybody is doing different things and having those different materials and putting those materials [together] … my assemblages, they come out of serendipity or a poetic moment.”
He related a tale about the making of “Chimes,” a strange bit of spontaneity rippling through its construction.
“My friend was holding [“Chimes”], and a bee came and stung him and died on his arm,” Daithi said. “So I took that carcass of that bee and I preserved it and I put it in my piece of art.”
Sure enough, when Daithi was showing me “Chimes,” the little bee’s carapace was lying on its side, abdomen facing us, on the left-hand shelf under the butterfly wing. “This is the bee that stung my friend,” he said simply.
He went onto explain the opossum skull’s purpose and presence, hearkening back to serendipity and poetic moments.
“I found this [opossum skull] up at my cabin, when I was making love to a girl I fell in love with,” Daithi explained. “I knew it was gonna be a part of something. I was making [“Chimes”] and I thought, ‘Oh, this is a home, this is a house, this is our self, you know what I mean. It’s life, you know.”
Daithi pointed out another facet of “Chimes” that may have gone unnoticed without his presence there.
“In the center of [“Chimes”] there’s a little small mirror, almost like a dental mirror. And you look there and you see your eyeball ... and that brings it around and tried to put it inside yourself ... [It’s a] very personal, soulful piece for me.”
Another poetic moment came an hour into the show, when I encountered Daithi placing a flower on his assemblage “Beyond.” He explained that a few months prior, he was asked to make a flower bouquet for Valentine’s Day and the deal fell through; now, mid-April, he revisited the incident.
“I woke up and said, ‘I’m gonna go over to that flower shop and get a flower for my piece of art.’ [The florist and I] had a conversation and kind of healed through that, because she wanted me to work and I didn’t want to work,” Daithi recalled.
Early on in the show, walking through the concrete-floored area, my attention was drawn to a corner display of two statues. One was a tall, lumbering T-post bird holding hacky sacks (appropriately named “Hacky Sack Bird”), and the other was a bike that had been hacked up and refashioned into a burlesque-type dancer. I looked at the name on the placard, “Art Schmaltz,” and I wanted desperately to speak to this artist about the bike. Sure enough, he was floating around nearby.
Standing at 6 foot 4 inches with a mane of gray-brown hair spilling over his wide-lens glasses, wearing a camo jacket and yellow turtleneck, Schmaltz gave off a “cool grandpa” vibe—he’s a couple weeks shy of 70—explaining the burlesque bike woman.
“I call it ‘Jacques Derrida’s Bicycle,’” Schmaltz said. “It had to be deconstructed and then reconstructed, according to the requirements of postmodernism.”
Schmaltz added he had finished the piece that morning and spoke a bit about the general impetus behind the project. “I was just about ready to take it to the recycling place and then I looked and I just kind of liked the form of the central chassis there, and then it took off.”
In a talk that ranged from goat herding (Schmaltz has a team of goats who do weed control; he gave me his goat card) to the psychology of dreams to kinesthetically involving yourself in art, Schmaltz postulated a credo of creation, which invests meaning in all his projects:
“Art is in some way a religious calling, also a social calling, an environmental calling and a calling to celebrate life.”
He went on to talk about the positive benefits of recycled art as a whole.
“You’re re-using a lot of material that would otherwise be landfilled,” Schmaltz explained. “You’re taking mundane functional pieces and showing they have the potential to be joyful, creative expressions of the world.”
Daithi echoed these sentiments when he was walking me through his assemblages.
“Art is the highest language of a culture, so we’re saying ‘whyn’t you make art out of that as well?’” he asked. “If we can do it in art, we can do it in every aspect. It’s time, don’t you think, that we start recycling everything. We need to recycle everything, everything needs to be recycled.”
Indeed, Daithi’s sentiments, paired with Schmaltz’, reminded me of something Roberts said over the phone prior to my visit.
“When something breaks, like a really beautiful plate, I don’t want it to just go in the trash,” Roberts explained as a general example of recycled art. “So using it in art to make like a mosaic mirror, tabletop or just something, you still get to see the thing that was broken—and now it’s not broken—now it’s part of something that’s maybe even better than it was when it was just a plate.”
The art will be viewable via appointment with Roberts until April 27.
