The Art District on Santa Fe was founded with the aim of promoting public awareness and art education in the city. The Centre for Visual Art, recently presented an exhibition named, Reclamation. The exhibition has been given the tag, âWhere the mundane is beautiful, the industrial is refined, and functions gives over to form.” The exhibition uses card boards discarded and splintered pallets, beer cans, billboard ads and film cartridges as the raw material in art making. Quite surprisingly, all these materials who are destined for the wasteland have been used as the raw material for creating new forms of great artistic value.
The exhibition displayed the works of various artists, including – Jon Reitfors, Terry Maker, Yumi Janairo Roth, Sabine Aell, Brian Cavanaugh and Ann Weber. Sabine Aell, whose work marks a paradigm shift from economic wealth to well-being of the human self involves cutting and repainting of old billboards and creating dazzling installations out of them. Terry Maker created huge resin-poured forms from elements used in everyday life such as medical records, straws and more. The work of Brian Cavanaugh aimed at creating something significant by using insignificant discarded objects. Yumi Janairo Roth, used patterns from Filipino furniture to modify discarded shipping palettes, which creates a form that is recognizable and unfamiliar to the users at the same time. Ann Weber, an artist from California known for transforming ordinary cardboard into massive sculptures of pods, gourds and organic spires, showed her works of art. According to her, these sculptures are metaphors for balancing acts in our real-life experiences.
Terry Makerâs âWater to Wineâ and âAkeldama,” give a spiritual tangle to this exhibition. Just like the Jesus converts âwater to wine,” in the Old Testament, in a similar way the artist symbolizes his work of converting trash to art. âAkeldama,” which is the name of the field purchased by Judas Iscariot with the silver he got for betraying Jesus, symbolizes crucifixion and resurrection. While some of us might think that the artists have exaggerated the consumer culture and its results, the artists silently point to our insensitive and uncaring attitude towards the nature. The exhibition succeeds in promoting awareness and educating people about the importance of recycling and reusing the so-called âwaste.”
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