PENDLETON — One person’s trash can be that same person’s art supplies; such is the case for many people taking part in Pendleton Artists Society’s “The Recycled Show,” which opened Friday.
“It’s like a new way of looking at it when you enlarge it that much,” said Tamara Magers of her serving-platter-size papier-mâché Doritos chip, which is mounted on a wall sporting a “Party Size” chip bag cap. She said she used paper and cardboard waste to create the work.
Magers is one of more than a dozen artists who submitted pieces made from materials that otherwise might have been thrown away in the trash or recycle bin. The show runs through March at Gallery 119 in downtown Pendleton.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery
Sherry Boram, whose mixed media piece “The Keepers” took first place, said for someone like her, who has “a tendency to collect things,” it is a fun show.
She said for her winning entry she combined a collection of small shampoo bottles, 40-year-old plastic stationery trays, and photos from an old calendar to create a work about things are important to many people, from the environment to children, and from coffee to secrets.
In another piece, she used sheet music her mother used in teaching in the 1920s as a background behind an arrangement of circles and squares with an environmental message: “What goes around is — recycled.”
Victor Eichhorn submitted a few pieces as well, including two lamps — one made from an old coffee pot and colander and another from some wood remnants and a spring — as well as life-size sunflowers from a variety of metal scraps, including rebar and a steel disc from a tractor.
Eichhorn said he’s retired and got into creating art after being a blacksmith at rendezvous historical gatherings, where he would camp out and make things for other rendezvous participants.
“The outgrowth of that was all this other stuff,” he said, including metal sculpting and lamp-making.
Eichhorn said he invested about $5 in materials the spring lamp and less than $10 in the coffee pot lamp, in additional to scraps from around his shop.
Eichhorn’s sunflowers earned him a Merit Award.
Other award winners in the show include Katie King, second place for “Pushing Through and On and in”; Brenda Morris-Jarrett, third place for “Here We Go Round in Circles”; Honorable Mentions for Magers for “Party Size,” Morris-Jarrett for “Shotgun Wedding,” and Carla Corbin for “The Circle Runs Away With The Spoon”; and a Merit Award for Kitty Myers for “Last of Its Kind.”
Magers, who has two works other than the Dorito in show — an epoxy fish made using “found objects” and two wire renditions of the Eiffel Tower — said she hesitated to enter the chip.
“I almost didn’t put it in because I thought ‘I don’t know if this is really art.’”
But whatever it is, people have responded to it, she said on Friday afternoon.
“The show hasn’t even opened yet and I’ve already got several comments on it,” Magers said. “They’re either amused or delighted.”
