As a young artist, Miguel Arzabe visited art shows around the US to learn from others’ work. But his biggest source of inspiration were the exhibit catalogues. Fascinated by the documents, he decided to make his own work out of the books themselves.
He cut the pages into thin strips and wove them into a large, intricate Andean tapestry called Last Weaving – because the strips would make a timeless and lasting work of art – completed in 2018.
Arzabe had previously made similar tapestries from used movie posters and old pamphlets. At first, it was hard to find buyers for the work, and Arzabe considered quitting. But his tapestries, blending ancient patterns with ubiquitous modern material, eventually gained traction in the art market. Beginning this month, Arzabe’s Last Weaving will hang from the ceiling of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) museum in San Francisco, part of The Poetics of Dimensions, a show of artwork made entirely of found and discarded objects – from plastic bags to shoelaces.
“These are all materials we recognize, but the artists have alchemized them” to help viewers think through consumerism, its aftermath and the ability of art to bring new life to thrown-away objects, said the show’s curator, Larry Ossei-Mensah.
Ossei-Mensah worked with Alison Gass, the museum’s director, for months to plan the show of art made with used toothpaste caps, zip ties, broken computer keys, perfume spray tubes and other used objects. They initially planned to mount the show at the museum, set up in 2022 at a former school gym in the city’s gentrifying Dogpatch neighborhood. But with weeks to go, the museum itself was offered a new space, in a building in downtown San Francisco, reportedly for free.
The show will now be housed among ageing vaults at the Cube, a former bank and one of San Francisco’s landmark buildings, which had lain vacant as the city’s tech workers increasingly began working from home. The found objects will be shown in a found space.
“We want to help viewers navigate the world through artistic practice,” Gass said on a recent Tuesday, as the artwork was coming out of crates. A large abstract painting, spread across two canvases, went from shades of pink to red. Closer inspection showed it was made entirely of durags carefully stitched together – a work by the artist Anthony Akinbola.
Together, the artworks seek to question what is desirable, bring visibility to the work of waste collectors and reveal the increasingly global nature of waste supply chains.
For instance, there is a nearly life-sized image of a woman in a pink coat bent low under a load she is carrying on her back. It is one of many images of waste pickers and porters from around the world created by the Los Angeles-based artist Huge McCloud. On a trip to Mumbai, McCloud saw plastic sacks being used to store nearly everything he saw, to transport products such as construction equipment, and to serve as roofing material. He began collecting these sacks and then single-use plastic bags from his travels to Morocco, the Philippines, Thailand, India and elsewhere. He stacked them by color at his studio, then cut out plastic strips and pressed them onto canvas using a clothing iron to create a painting-like effect.
Much of the plastic waste in the US and Europe is shipped to Asia, where waste pickers like those McCloud portrays collect plastic to resell. “I am concerned with social inequality and through my art I want to show what we ignore,” McCloud says. “I am trying to use my work to open up these conversations, create a manageable way for viewers to swallow truth.”
Arzabe, meanwhile, says his own work was initially a response to the Bay Area’s tech boom. “So much money was going towards creating newer and more complex technology,” he says. “I wanted to show that complexity and value could be created through humble materials.”
The Poetics of Dimensions is on view at San Francisco’s Institute of Contemporary Art from 25 October to 23 February
