Residues of Concern

Residues of Concern is a collaborative art installation depicting the history of an imagined landfill. Before the landfill, the general public and businesses used open dumps across the country to take care of waste products for the community. These unregulated parcels burned, crushed, and plowed under garbage into acres of land without environmental concerns. Leachate from these sites continually seeps into the water and soil, affecting all forms of nature.

Our installation will show a visual history of the landfill starting in the 1950s by utilizing collages from magazines, catalogs, and other sources that sold household products. Some of these products are still in the ground, in anaerobic conditions, slowly breaking down. The viewer will be presented with image-layers of the past in the form of cut-outs of recognizable products ranging from bleach bottles to cathode ray tubes. Anything and everything thought of as obsolete garbage in the eyes of the owner. Think of an archeologist exposing layers of a buried city at an excavation site. There is much to learn about a specific culture based on their refuse. We want the viewer to look back on our past errors concerning sanitation and move beyond the notion that we didn’t know any better because we did; we just didn’t care. As a result of our carelessness, plants, and animals adapted or died.