“Like Long-Held Echoes: On Two Projects Made Possible by the Waste Stream”
“Like Long-Held Echoes: On Two Projects Made Possible by the Waste Stream”
by Stan Mir | Hyperallergic
March 10, 2017
PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), with its Greek Revival architecture, is perhaps the most iconic symbol of the art establishment in the city. Completed in 1928, the museum sits at the end of Benjamin Franklin Parkway, where a majority of the city’s prestigious museums are located.
Philli, Ana Peñalba’s current exhibition in The Galleries at Moore College of Art & Design, presents photographs that re-create a number of iconic buildings in Philadelphia, including the PMA and Robert Venturi’s Guild House, with detritus found at Revolution Recovery, a recycling yard in the city’s Northeast.
In 2010, Billy Dufala, who is also an artist, and Fern Gookin founded the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR), in cooperation with Revolution. Since that time they have hosted over forty artists from around the world, providing access to roughly 350 tons of goods that the rest of us throw away. As I mentioned in a piece about an exhibition of Billy and Steven Dufala’s artwork, it’s possible to find anything at the Revolution site, from old magazines to records, beds, and knickknacks. One day, in 2015, Billy encountered a Donald Trump doll from the eighties and moved it into his office. (I wonder if it’s still there.) Dufala’s experiences at Revolution, I wrote, “[force] him to confront the tendency to become sentimental about the objects in our lives.