New U of L exhibit is nothing but trash
How we look and think about waste management and recycling is the focus of a new art exhibit at the Helen Christou Gallery at the University of Lethbridge.
“Trash Talk,” by local artist Maria Madacky, opened Thursday. The exhibit is a response to the different ways the university has decided to handle waste and recycling, and the City of Lethbridge, which recently decided not to start a curbside recycling plan.
The exhibit uses paintings, drawings and videography to explore waste reduction. The exhibit includes oil paintings done on recycled materials, “exquisite corpse” drawings, and a video titled “Reduce, Reuse, Re:psychic.”
Madacky received an Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant to look at waste, recycling and composting in order to create a public engagement project.
“There had been a lot going on in the city (at the time),” Josephine Mills, director and curator of the U of L Art Gallery said. “City council had voted against having curbside recycling, which is shocking to me.
“The university, on the other hand, has done the opposite and has totally implemented composting and recycling on campus.”
The exhibit is one of a number of upcoming shows that will encourage social engagement of environmental issues and spark conversations about those issues.
“We’re pretty stuck in the conversation we’re having,” Mills said. “So rather than having a literal conversation with words, artists use visual imagery and it can kind of shift an individual’s thinking and open up perspectives.”
The exhibit is a collaboration between Madacky and the MEDIUM Collective. The name is an acronym for Metaphysical Exploration Divination and Investigation Utilizing Magic.
The group normally holds performances, but, for this exhibit, they made a film offering a narrative line for another part of the exhibit: a series of dolls made from recycled clay and other materials that have the seeds of local flowers in their chests and stomachs. The dolls are then buried in the earth so that seeds can sprout and grow.
The exhibit also includes a number of sketches, collaborative paintings and images of the Lethbridge landfill.
“It is about recycling and purification,” said Madacky.
“The idea was raising ideas about problems that develop from waste management. We wanted to prompt people to think more about problems with consumerism, and more about recycling and reusing items instead of throwing them away and buying new.”
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