The Dump Show: A Collaboration with the Recology Artist in Residence Program

The Dump Show is a collaboration with, and an homage to, the Recology Artist in Residence Program. It’s also an acknowledgement and celebration of the legacy of artists in the Bay Area working with found materials. Assembling 20 artists who have participated in the Recology program, we explore the transformational methodologies and idiosyncratic materials of artists working with the things we cast off. The San Francisco dump, run by Recology, is a transfer station where stuff discarded by San Franciscans gets sorted every day. From this detritus, artists in the Residence Program create artworks that generate conversations around the history of lives lived in the Bay Area.

In the 20th-century the practice of using found objects and scavenged materials emerged from surrealism, and gained momentum with pop and late 20th-Century installation art. From Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and Fountain to Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, Jess, Bruce Conner, William T. Wiley and Betye Saar in the mid-century, then Tim Noble & Sue Webster or Jessica Stockholder in the 1990s, artists have used unconventional materials out of necessity and invention. While these artworks sometimes referred to the history of the objects utilized, the story of the people who owned the things that became art materials was often unmentioned.

In contrast, artists appropriating recycled materials in the 21st century — those in the Recology program — engage more deeply with the history of the objects that are their raw materials, and the lives of their former owners. 

Mansur Nurullah’s large-scale textiles are emotional landscapes made from discarded clothing, scrapped couches, fallen road signs, upholstery samples, and disassembled shoes and purses. Nurullah’s intuitive process both charts his “way out of things” and creates topographical maps of the imagined past and interrupted future of the materials he uses. Kari Orvik’s photographs taken in the environs of the dump show mountains of discarded mattresses, with their stained surfaces and exposed internal springs.  What could be more intimate and evocative — and at the same time mysterious — than the debris upon which generations of San Franciscans slept, loved and dreamed?

As they grapple with what’s been left behind by others, Recology artists spend time with personal, local, and global pasts, reworking them into a different kind of engagement with history itself.

Film Screening Evening: Thursday, July 18