Plastic bags, perfume-bottle straws and shoelaces – these are not things you’d commonly associate with high art. But why not? Many hallowed artists in the modern canon use lowbrow materials for their inspiration, from Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s sculptures of household rubbish and taxidermied animals to Charles Long’s cigarette butts and bird poop salvaged from the L.A. River.
“The Poetics of Dimensions,” a new group exhibition in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood, celebrates the clever reuse of such ordinary objects – in many cases, plain ol’ garbage. Put on by the Ghanaian-American curator Larry Ossei-Mensah, the show gathers nearly a dozen artists working with materials like scrap leather, cosmetics containers and single-use plastic.
Anthony Akinbola, a Brooklyn artist who’s exhibited at the Guggenheim, weaves colorfully abstract tapestries out of durags, the hair covering you can buy for 19 cents on Amazon. Moffat Takadiwa, who lives in Zimbabwe, sources post-consumer waste that Western countries dump in his country’s junkyards to make intricate sculptures out of toothpaste tubes, computer keyboards and spray cans.
You might just walk away from this one with a new hesitation about hucking things in the trash.
Details: Show runs Wednesday-Sunday until February 23, 2025, at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco, 345 Montgomery St., San Francisco; free admission, icasf.org