Consumed – Interactive Website

Project Statement

Consumed is a Public Art Project commissioned by the City of Phoenix through the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture’s Public Art Program. For this project, I photographed nearly 6000 individual pieces of waist at a recycling transfer station in Phoenix, Arizona. I then build a digital archive of these photographs and keywords ranging from categories, including material, color, and use. The keywords were chosen for various reasons: their connection to categories of recyclables (paper, plastic, cardboard); the visual qualities of the objects (red, orange, yellow); the use of the objects (water bottle, toy); and personal interactions with the objects (kids’ drawings). The database functions as an image bank from which I created prints of selected image groups. The keywords used to generate these groups are chosen for visual impact and highlight consumer choices.

During the year that I worked on, Consumed environmental awareness hit a new high in social and political dialogs. For me, this awareness took two major forms. First, the current rate of consumption of resources is unsustainable, posing a global environmental threat, and second that this same consumption pattern has weakened the world economy. Central to my understanding of this project is that looking at what we own and consume reveals something about our identity and culture and that this examination underlines the importance of making thoughtful choices in what we do with these objects.

The project manifested in a set of still images and an interactive website located at http://phoenixrecyclingproject.org/.

This project was commissioned by the City of Phoenix through the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture’s Public Art Program.

Essay:

Nancy Levinson, “The Art of Solid Waste,” Places Journal, April 2010. https://placesjournal.org/article/the-art-of-solid-waste/