Press
Scenes from the Somerville Trash Bash
May 20, 2013
The Boston Globe
Photo and Article
More than 200 people came to Arts at the Armory Saturday, where artists, crafters, recyclers, and upcyclers submitted creations to the Trash Bash: Somerville’s First Recycled Art Competition. The event also included music and workshops. Chains were constructed of can poptops, a guitar was embellished with found items, and Jackie Olivia wore a dress made of used playing cards. First-prize winners at the event were Liam Beretsky-Jewell in the youth category and Consuelo Perez in the adult competition.
Trash Becomes Art in Union Square
June 25, 2014
The Somerville Times
Cover Print Photo and Article
By Jack Adams
On June 22, at the Uniun Warehouse in Somerville, the 2nd annual Trash Bash was held, a competition where art submitted had to be entirely made out of trash. Over 40 artists entered their work, for both the adult and youth competitions.
Jennifer Lawrence and Debra McLaughlin of ArtsUnion organized the Bash. McLaughlin said that about 25 percent of the artists there this year had participated the year before as well, although this year they had to submit different art.
The adult competition was close, but Kathy Abbot won for her piece The Angry Ocean, with Consuelo Perez and her piece Trash to Treasure, and Jackie Olivia’s The DC/Marvel Superhero Comic Book Dress” coming in second and third respectively.
For the youth competition, first place went to Aidan Pitman for I Am My Piece, second to Tufts Educational Day Care Center for Dumbo, and third to Tatiana Thomas for Glittering Mirror.
Laura Wilhelm and Wayne Nickerson of Collaborative Artworks, Inc. in Lynn submitted pieces to the Trash Bash.
Nickerson’s art consisted of blocks of wood, which he said were from construction sites, covered with intricate pen drawings. When it comes to the wood selection process, Nickerson said he “likes funky.”
“We’re a safe space for artists, and everybody, economic, whatever your struggle, you come in and mentor people. We have about eight [people] right now, we’re a small and intimate group,” said Wilhelm, who is the director of Collaborative Artworks, Inc.
Wilhelm’s piece in the show is called People Trap and consists of rusty lobster traps bent into the shape of a person, filled with trash. She said it was a commentary on the pollution in the oceans.
“I don’t mean to be a pessimist, it just struck me as something to do,” said Wilhelm.
Wilhelm said it was difficult to make. “I used a hammer to jimmy and make the curves, I used a hack saw to cut where I saw fit, wrapped it around, stepped on it, swore at it, had a great time.”
Sylvia deMurias used copper to make jewelry given to her by her son, who works at a copper and slate company. Ever since she took a jewelry class at MassArt she’s been making jewelry, which she sells and exhibits in different shows.
She said she typically spends about three to four hours on each piece, but they can take even longer, accounting for drilling holes and final polishing.
One artist chose to display her art in a very unconventional manner: by wearing it. Jackie Olivia’s piece, The DC/Marvel Superhero Comic Book Dress, was a full dress made out of Marvel and DC comic books, spanning from 1977 to 2008.
“I’ve liked super hero comics since I can remember. My older cousins had them so I remember reading comics back then,” said Olivia.
She sewed them together, using the covers to create the top part of the dress, and the paper pages for the skirt. She said the skirt took 20 hours, and the whole dress consisted of 60 different comic books.
“A lot of the older comics didn’t have as many ads, so I got a little more mileage out of those. I was kind of joking about making a villain costume out of the ads, because I have piles of these ads that I’m not using,” said Olivia.
For last year’s Trash Bash, she wore a dress made out of cards.
Dumbo, by kindergarteners from the Tufts Educational Day Care Center was a replica of Jumbo the elephant, the Tufts University mascot. They built it by stacking boxes, covering it in newspapers, then painting it gray.
Debra McLaughlin said she hopes to make the Trash Bash an annual occurrence at the Uniun Warehouse.
Pulling Art from the Bin
December 12, 2014
The Harvard Gazette
Colleen Walsh
Harvard Staff Writer
Designers for 'O.P.C.' get creative with recycled materials
For the past 15 seasons Jeannette Hawley has spent untold hours at the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.). She never takes a bow on stage, but her creations always do.
As manager of the A.R.T.’s costume shop, Hawley is the magician designers enlist to bring their visions to life. “We do say we build the costumes,” said Hawley, “because we do engineer them.”
That detailed work, which helps establish the tone of a production, includes not just consultations with costume designers, but responsibility for fabrics that can move and breathe with the actors, won’t cause allergic reactions, and will withstand regular washings. It all happens three floors above the Loeb main stage.
Through the years Hawley has outfitted flying actors, actors on stilts, acrobats and tumblers, even a sorcerer for a spectacular quick-change illusion created by Teller, who recently took a break from his duties as the silent half of the comedy-magic duo Penn & Teller to co-direct a staging of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.”
“That was one of the highlights, because I actually got to build a fabric magic trick for him,” said Hawley, who was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement promising to keep the costume’s secret before she sewed the first stitch.
On a recent afternoon in her crowded shop — lined with long tables, sewing machines, rolls of fabric, and spools of thread — Hawley and her team were hard at work on their latest challenge: using as much recycled, upcycled, and found materials as possible to create costumes for the premiere of Eve Ensler’s “O.P.C.”
The comedy by the activist-playwright best known for “The Vagina Monologues” tracks the life of a young dumpster-diving freegan struggling to come to terms with society’s consumerism, consumption, and waste, and the wishes of her mother, a candidate for senate. (The titular acronym stands for obsessive political correctness.)
The main character “lives in this world of pulling things together” said Hawley, who took a similar approach in her role, working in the spirit of “trashion” — wearable salvation for someone else’s junk. While many of the costumes were crafted from A.R.T. leftovers, some were fashioned from less-conventional fabrics.
“This is my project,” said Hawley, proudly holding up a section of material carefully crocheted out of strips of old T-shirts and plastic bags. “This will become a vest.”
Across the hall, members of the craft department were at work on other dresses for the show. One of the play’s couture gowns, created to resemble the skin of the African horned melon, was being embellished with painted golf tees. Other garments were fashioned from old lawn chairs, yoga mats, newspapers, and even discarded Halloween candy wrappers.
FROM TRASH TO THEATER TREASURE
Similarly, members of the prop team took to Craigslist looking for free stuff, then hit thrift shops hunting for items they could use to decorate the set. Dumpsters were another resource. Among their ideas: furniture made from old road signs.
“I think it’s very much a play about invention and hope and possibility and so we wanted to kind of crack open the traditional paradigm for making theater and try something that was new,” said the show’s director, Pesha Rudnick. That novel approach was pushed beyond the props, sets, and costumes to the rehearsal room and even the audience. Limited numbers of scripts were printed to cut waste, and programs won’t be distributed in the theater.
A trash treasure hunt also played out at the A.R.T. scene shop, an 18,000-square-foot building in a nearby office park where sets are built from the ground up. The multifaceted shop, outfitted with heavy machinery, is, as Technical Director Stephen Setterlun likes to say, “a factory designed to build everything, because you never know what you’re going to get.” What he got with “O.P.C.” was the challenge of creating a set from garbage.
“I wanted the set to be the sculptural creation of the waste they can find in Cambridge,” said set designer Brett Banakis in a video posted on the A.R.T. website.
Setterlun was up to the task. One hundred and fifty stacked wooden pallets, courtesy of a local garden center, form part of the set. A towering wall on the stage is a second life for hundreds of cardboard boxes collected from five grocery stores in the early morning hours as deliveries rolled in.
One day, driving past a demolition in progress, Setterlun stopped his car and offered to haul away all the steel and plastic being tossed into a bin from the building’s third-floor window.
“These guys looked at us like we were nuts,” he recalled. “Then they said, ‘Sure, just make it quick.’”
The finished set is about 90 percent recycled materials, said Setterlun, who took the task in stride.
“Every day is just another challenge.”
The world premier of “O.P.C.” by Eve Ensler and directed by Pesha Rudnick will be performed at the American Repertory Theater through Jan. 4. For more information, including times and ticket information, visit the A.R.T. website.