Unwanted Materials to Form Genuine Masterpieces

We normally associate old, useless materials with garbage. Before I read the New York Times article on the “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary” exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, I felt pretty much the same like the rest of the general population. Considering that I have never been to this particular museum before and that it is free admission with the cultural passport, I decided to visit it to see the special exhibition. What I saw astounded me; even “garbage” can be reformed to create extraordinary pieces of art that inspire such piquant pleasure to the human sight.

The purpose of the artists whose masterpieces are displayed is to “transform the ordinary into extraordinary works of art.” One worn item that is widely prevalent in our daily lives (such as a comb) may be trivial, but not when thousands of replications of the same item are combined to form larger, more meaningful pieces of artwork. As visitors probe deeper down below the glamorous surfaces, they will discover in amazement that such complexities at first glances can consist of such common basic parts underneath.

The first piece of artwork that caught my attention as I exited the elevator on the fifth floor of the museum was “Perpetual Stream,” created by the artist, Steven Deo. Here two human sculptures, cropped at the knees, stand side by side. Covered from head to toe with jigsaw puzzle pieces, they represent the themes of dislocation and then relocation  in his culture. Deo takes thousands of scattered puzzle pieces and attaches them, layer upon layer, to the sculptures. The puzzle pieces amazingly symbolize his themes really well; the great disparity of the puzzle pieces represents the diversity of the individuals who relocate to a central location from all over. Puzzle pieces are usually scattered to begin with, and it is up to an individual to piece them all together to form a whole scene.

Sonya Clark manipulates the appearances and positions of thousands of ordinary black combs and places them adjacent to each other to create a canvas of “Madam C.J. Walker.” To configure the background, she patiently plucks all the black teeth from some of the combs. She leaves the black teeth on some of the other combs and alters the amount on each one as the configurations of the combs gradually develop into the precise outward physical features of the woman. Not one detail is neglected-from the outline of the shoulders and top half of the body, to the thick mass of hair, the thick eyebrows, the large eyes, the firm line of the mouth, and the fine, pointed chin. It is very creative of how Clark uses a mundane hair-care product, a comb, as the backbone of a piece of an artwork that she diligently constructs. It must have taken a long time to figure out the appropriate positions of the combs, whether certain ones should be placed horizontally or vertically, for them to resemble a woman entirely.

Nnenna Okone rescues “unwanted” magazine paper from waste and decay to make it useful and beautiful in “Lamps.” Coming from a third-world country, she constructs these artistic structures as a reaction to the profligate waste in the US. “Lamps” consists of identical structures, each revolving around a central light source; each structures consists of a ceiling light with wires spiraling down and rolls of magazine paper entwined between every two levels of wire. The magazine paper does not serve any practical purpose; in fact it impedes on the practical function of the light since it makes the surroundings dimmer with the mass of rolls of paper encircling the light. The main point is that Clark finds an artistic way to reuse “unwanted” paper. While I was examining the intricate composition of “Lamps,” I truly understood her distaste of how so many Americans waste paper that can be potentially recycled, even though it may be reused for decorative purposes only.

In “A Portrait of a Textile Worker,” Teres Agnew makes one person visible among millions of unseen workers in a textile factory from thirty thousand clothing labels. She realizes one day that consumers buy the clothing with all the big brand names, such as Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, without giving enough recognition to the textile workers and the hard work and dedication they contribute in making these clothes. Instead of painting a scene illustrating the enormous amount of workers in a single factory, Agnew chooses to zoom in on an average worker and makes her a representative of the many others. Agnew collects the clothing labels after she purchases clothes and stitches together a whole scene: a woman at work, manufacturing a new piece of apparel, on a textile machine with other workers in the background. The colors of the clothing the woman wears are formed from the different clothing labels. For example, labels that are partly blue are pieced together to form the particular blue shirt the woman wears. The textile machine itself is formed from labels with the famous brands and their symbols; even though it is hard work, in the end consumers are eager to buy the best brands of clothing. Agnew does a good deed by saving the clothing labels and giving credit to the textile workers at the same time.

I was not disappointed at all by this trip to the Museum of Arts and Design. It opened up a whole new world to me of the endless ways that unwanted materials, which I consider already art in their own ways, can be modified and reformed to create even better pieces of art for the general public.