This Show is Trash

×

Expand

Tanya Klimp, 2024

(courtesy of the Gallery)

Tanya Klimp, MFA Painting

Much of the world’s waste currently exists in the form of discarded packaging. Packaging often designed to cloak corporate ideologies and perspectives, obfuscating true intentions. This waste is not just to protect and enclose a ​“product” but also to instill desire to purchase or re-purchase, and oftentimes, to do so after the original product has been used or removed. My thesis navigates latent/​dormant content within discarded packaging while weaving and painting other ​“content” in. I alter these quickly produced and rapidly discarded objects through slow processes of artistic intervention, and transmogrify them from abject and denigrated to valued and elevated. Within this murky affinity between waste, consumers and content — emerge hybrids and chimeras.

Darcy Fraser Macdonald, MFA Intermedia

Darcy began collecting historical trash objects from the North Saskatchewan river valley in the fall of 2020. This waste, which was deposited up until the immediate post-war period (circa 1947) is contemporaneous with the Edmonton of his paternal grandparents; it is their trash and the trash of the community around them. His thesis work takes 8 of these discarded objects/​materials from the Rat Creek dumpsite plus two familial objects from the 1940s (one from each paternal grandparent) as its starting point for exploring the complex legacies of inheritance and waste left to us by previous generations.