BEAUTIFUL TRASH Visual installation by Adrian Arias

Artist in residence at the de Young Museum, December 2010

  The long life of plastic invades the beaches of all coasts, almost without exception. Where there are humans, there is plastic: colored plastic, small fragments that were part of a lid, a container, a chip, a sorbet, a plastic fishing net, a nylon cord, a glove; something that was made of plastic in a factory very far from the beach. Though, it cannot destroy it because the majority of plastics take more than 400 years to degrade. Those small pieces of color become a part of the "esthetic" of the beaches and eventually, the mortal alimentation of a bird or mammal that confuses it with true food.
As can be seen in the accompanying digital models, the exhibition walls will be covered with the images amplified 80 times their real sizes, in order to increase the impact and nearness to humanity of the "colored Garbage" playing with the idea of magnitude created by Pop artists.
    A video will be projected on the 4 screens at Kimball Gallery, using still and in-movement images taken at the beaches for this project.

    A "Humanoid of plastic" and its island will be built using plastic containers glasses, lids, and other plastic objects.

        From Wednesday to Sunday, from 1 to 5pm, the visitors will be working with Adrian building a series of "Totems-Boxes" with different kinds of plastic.

    The still pieces of garbage are the inspiration for this project, along with the lack of consciousness of human beings to leave their footprints long after their deaths.
    BEAUTIFUL TRASH is an approximation of the "color" esthetically and ethically caused by the interruption of natural space with the "remains" of garbage, basically plastics.  The installation topography video and performance that make up BORDER TRASH are created from materials taped, photographed and taken from the beaches of Peru, Mexico, Spain and the United States.
     The idea is to generate a collective consciousness about the existence of the unmeasured use of plastic, the ecological problems caused by the excessive amount of garbage on the planet and the real existence of the Trash Vortex* in the north Pacific, as well as to satirize the "fantasy" coloring that we give to our beaches with the remains of the plastic garbage that we leave.

    Adrian is working to put together a series of performances with musicians and dancers of the Bay Area to create a special piece for BEAUTIFUL TRASH.

    The large scale exhibition with the objects created at the Kimball Gallery will be showed in 2011 in a Gallery space to be announced later. 

* "Trash Vortex" is a type of garbage formation where for every kilo of plankton there are 6 kilos of plastic. In actuality it is the twice the size of the state of Texas or the size of Peru (more an area of a million, three hundred thousand square kilometers).

More recycled art pieces here