Brian Slattery photo
A deer head with flowers for eyes. Streams of color stretching down from the ceiling. And, on a couple dozen cardboard panels, all manner of people, in all manner of poses. It’s all part of “This Art is Trash,” an exhibition at Never Ending Books on State Street by artist Alice Prael that puts humanity into the things we usually throw away.
“I like to make art out of trash, particularly drawing and painting on cardboard,” Prael writes in an accompanying zine. “The materials feel low pressure and are easy to get for free. My grandfather also painted on cardboard, lots of pasta boxes.”
The materials have led partly to the development of a message. “I didn’t start because of environmentalism, but you can’t play with this much trash without thinking about it. It was really hard to ignore last year when I was gluing trash into the shape of plants and the sky turned orange and hazy. I guess Canada was on fire, another impact of climate change. A few months later another Nakba in Palestine started, another accelerant of climate change. It’s all connected, for good and bad,” Prael continues, noting that “environmentalism cannot be separated from anti-militarism. If it were its own country, the U.S. military would be the 47th highest polluting country.”
The figures in Prael’s art all come from photographs on Unsplash, a website of photography explicitly shared for the purposes of artistic collaboration. Prael pulls the figures from a wide range of photo types, with little to do with one another. What draws Prael to a specific figure has to do with form: the figure’s posture or pose, and even more often, the drape of the clothes, which Prael seeks to render as simply and accurately as possible.
Prael’s figures all together add up to a sense of deep, collective humanity, something like particularly attentive street photography. In the drawings we meet people of all shapes and sizes, walks of life. Prael gives each of them the same care, focusing on the simplest lines that convey a sense of the person most directly. It looks easy but it’s not. The art helps us notice the materials, too. Maybe we shouldn’t be so fast to throw things like it away.
Nestled in part of the exhibition is a figure who isn’t taken from a photo on Unsplash, but from personal history. The child in the dress is taken from a photo of Prael’s past. Prael suggested that maybe that’s the direction the art is moving in. In other people, and in the materials of this world, is where we find ourselves, too.
“This Art is Trash” runs at Never Ending Books through the end of September. Check the State Street spot’s website for hours and more information about upcoming events.