Corvallis Garbage Fest: A Festival of Found Objects

This Saturday, March 19, there will be a new entry to the local DIY scene in the form of the Corvallis Garbage Fest – a first-time festival of found objects and discarded materials that have been creatively repurposed by local and touring artists in a wide variety of mediums. Taking place at the Thompson Shelter in Avery Park, on SW Avery Park Lane, there will be trash installations, trash photography, trash videos, trash puppetry, trash music, trash costumes, trash zines, and more trash stuff.

In keeping with its DIY theme, the festival will be powered by Community Power Pods PDX, a mutual aid group that, for the past year-and-a-half, has been creating battery packs, solar generators, and mobile power units with recycled car cells from vehicles that have been in accidents.

The event will also include tabling from local activists, organizations, and other mutual aid groups, including the Corvallis Really Really Free Market.

One of the organizers behind the festival is Chris Durnin, co-founder of Corvallis Experiments in Noise, a community of experimental musicians and artists that puts on noise shows, street performances, puppet shows, and other DIY events in town.

“I’ve been doing shows here for six years on a constant basis prior to COVID, and I’ve met a lot of different artists who are making things out of trash,” said Durnin. “So I thought, let’s just do a trash fest.”

Durnin said the idea to organize a garbage festival was catalyzed by a few of his friends in the experimental arts scene, including Kalan Sherrard, a Seattle-based trash puppeteer, installation artist, and street performer who will be among the festival’s touring artists.

“They do street performance puppetry work, and they make puppets out of a lot of found material, recycled material, repurposed material,” said Durnin. “Then my friend Joe [Bryan], who also does puppetry work and has actually toured nationally as a puppeteer, is in a band out of Portland called Dead Death where the trash puppets that he makes are kind of at the front and center. So Kalan wants to start this roving tour of trash puppeteers, and he wants my group and Joe’s group to be a part of that.”

Under Sherrard’s direction, the Garbage Fest will relocate under the Hawthorne Bridge in Portland on March 20, then to Freeway Park in Seattle and to The Mantis House in Olympia, Washington on the 25th and 26th, respectively.

Possibility, Playfulness, and Prevalence of Trash

For some of the artists who will be having their work featured, a big proponent of working with garbage as their medium is endowing it with new meaning – and playing with beautifying it.

Sherrard writes on their website that “cast-off trash has the root of reincarnate possibility…” Trash art, then, is a composition of objects that “are discarded, post-consumer figures — at once automatically critical… of the system which produced and discarded them, and resurrected, phoenix-like, from the refuse.” By repurposing them, they are “stripped of their narrative” and “liberated… into an abstracted new being, given an allowance infinitely beyond their utility…”

Zephyr, an employee at Interzone Cafe, began engaging in this kind of “resurrection” as she encountered places throughout the state that had become dumping sites.

“When I moved to Oregon around seven years ago, I took a lot of trips in my car, and right away I was finding a lot of abandoned places, and I started exploring those places and taking pictures of all the things that are left there,” she said. “And then I just started collecting stuff and arranging it, and then at my job I started collecting all the things that normally go to the garbage – bagel bags, receipt paper rolls, soda can pop tops, plus the plastic parts that come in a giant thing of saran wrap. They’re all really cool; I’ve been saving them up over the years, and I just thought it would be neat to make stuff with it.”

Koa A. Tom, a local “photographist” — photographer, artist, and activist — and owner of Light Rider Studios, began taking a growing interest in photographing garbage as they observed some of the material traces of the pandemic showing up as litter.

“Like an invasive weed [sic] disposable surgical masks began cropping up as regular roadside waste a year ago due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” wrote Tom on their website. “For me, as with other waste, these masks bring up thoughts about persistence, prevalence & [sic] ephemerality.”

Their work for the festival is titled “Human Remains” and includes photographs of garbage they found in various parts of Corvallis and Seattle.

“If we create things that aren’t meant to last, then it’s hard to place a value on them,” said Tom. “Most people relate to other people versus inanimate objects, so how do you humanize them, but also paint a positive future picture behind them?”

On the posterity of used and discarded objects, they write, “I have long seen trash as future fossils–my cultural legacy. Naturally this brings up the question, ‘is art garbage.’ [sic] This is distinct from the question as to whether trash & other found objects constitute art, though it is a continuation of this discussion…”

Tom goes on to write that when something loses value, for whatever reason, it becomes regarded and handled as waste. But for them, when this waste appears in natural or urban environments, photographing it not only reclaims its value, but also exposes the transitory relationship that many people believe they have to place, despite the material traces they leave behind that will have an impact on said place for years to come.

“I appreciate ‘disposable’ materials for their text and cultural associations,” they said. “In this way they act like graffiti, creating a conversation in or with the environment — a residue of humanity, its values and attendant actions.”

Trash Art and Creative Liberty

Durnin sees the garbage fest as a kind of outgrowth to the noise shows he’s organized over the years.

“One of the reasons why I started doing noise shows is because I saw it as an incredibly inclusive format,” he said. “Guitars cost a lot of money, amps cost a lot of money, microphones cost a lot of money, whereas I’ve literally pulled sets out of dumpsters before I play or just found them on the way to a show. So it becomes incredibly inclusive when you take away that financial burden, and trash can be the same way – it’s free, and that also eliminates some of the costs that can exist with certain kinds of art and depending on what you’re trying to produce.”

Durnin added that there is something empowering about having a format in which people can freely create without burdening themselves with the expectations of having to possess a certain level of skill or “talent” to do so.

“In the noise vein, I was trying to get as many people involved under the context that there’s no right or wrong way to do it; you can make noise out of anything,” he said. “So with trash, we’re

trying to say, here’s this material that’s readily available; you can make anything you want with it, which is what this festival is trying to showcase. It’s why we’re having so many different artists in so many different mediums. It’s like, look at all the different ways you can play with this.”

Durnin wrote a children’s story for the festival that explores this idea. The artists in the story experiment with the question of: If people turned all of the world’s trash into art, what would the world look like?

“As an artist, I sometimes debate whether I should be making physical objects in a world that already has so much waste,” said Tom. “And the one thing I never learned in art school is, what is art? No one defines that for you. There’s this arbitrariness to art that helps me recognize that it’s just someone’s opinion whether something you create is ‘garbage’ or not. So, why not have the medium just literally be garbage?”

“Just have fun with it,” said Durnin. “Just enjoy. Just create.”

The garbage fest will begin at 5:00 p.m. While not required, Durnin encourages people who are interested in attending, to show care for others by being fully vaccinated, wearing masks, and socially distancing. Donations are also encouraged for the traveling artists who will be participating in the event.

By Emilie Ratcliff