UNEXPECTED ART: Creating Art from Dumpsters*

Excerpt from Mark Webb (Louisville, KY), Artist & Photographer:

Why did you decide to work with creating art from dumpsters?

"Who would think you can extract art from the side of a commercial dumpster! But the art is there—you just have to look closely. When I write poetry, I concentrate on small things to extract larger meaning, in much the same way as Frank O’Hara’s poetry often focuses on the mundane and the routine. I use the same process with my photography. The abstract images I find on a dumpster may only be a few inches wide, but it’s all about taking your time and using your imagination, finding patterns that suggest movement in the shapes, and looking for variations in colors, textures, lines, and weathering. This varies by company and the colors of their dumpsters—red, yellow, blue, green, brown. I’ve even found some cool, turquoise-shaded dumpsters. I call this project Unexpected Art: accidental splatters of paint, forklift gouging, and the randomness of rust found on the ubiquitous bins we see but never notice. As an example, dumpsters are picked up by the large lifts on the trucks. That regular pick-up routine creates scrapes in the paint. It rains and the paint weathers. Over time the scrapes evolve into abstract patterns that I can use in my photographs. Virtually every dumpster has these patterns on the sides created by this emptying/removal process. That’s just one example. There are lots of ways dumpsters “age”."

The full article can be found here: https://wasteadvantagemag.com/creating-art-from-dumpsters/

* This article was original read by Meridian Waste on Waste Advantage Magazine 6-27-2023