Rewind: Kelly Wood
The Power Plant, Toronto
The most telling thing about Kelly Wood's The Continuous Garbage Project: 1998-2003 is that few seagulls clamour to get in; the gallery entrance is conspicuously devoid of their circling cries and pernicious scavenging. Nor will one find a team of smoke-plumed, grime-smeared front-end loaders. And there's definitely no need for gas masks, unless one wishes to make a fashion statement, that is.
While art doesn't usually attract such biological and mechanical accoutrements, piles of garbage most certainly do. This is where the line gets drawn between what The Continuous Garbage Project is and what it is ostensibly about. Where good garbage is gooey and gross, chaotic and crazy, these photographs are the opposite—clean, studio-lit and downright unstinky, placed in orderly, gridded fashion.
That's not to say there is little value to the project. As documentation of a performance—the performance being a five-year-long, week-in, week-out ritual of pausing to photograph one's garbage before jettisoning it—the project works quite well. An implied critique of consumer culture also holds. But the labour, as well as the sensation, is implied, not felt. The nose wrinkles not, and the stomach fails to turn.
The representational codes Wood uses, popular in commercial photography, make for some amusing extrapolations. At some of those coolly flash-frozen moments, the bags look like supermodels, slouching aloof against ultra-clean backgrounds, just translucent enough to enable projection of fantasy. Arranged as a taxidermied taxonomy, the work also suggests a cataloguing of species. Branded with logos and design elements, and bunny-like with their stuck-up ears, the detritus-stuffed bags seem to sniff the studio air expectantly, eternally eager to meet more of their own kind.
Treated in this way, the bags of garbage become quite benign, as pleasant to behold as any English country landscape. Consisting of a contemporary palette—lots of white, with occasional splashes of bold colour—the images wouldn't look out of place in the home-decor section of IKEA (which, in this case, would mean Swedish for big clear plastic garbage bags).
Yet there are other layers to be plumbed here. Archaeologists know that trash operates as an unintentional material self-representation, and this work similarly functions as mirror. Looking into its tinfoil-silvered glass, we see that everything, sadly, remains more or less the same. Though objects of pain and loss can be jettisoned, pain and loss (and most certainly waste) remain. They just get buried elsewhere.
Spring 2005
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