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Utilizing recycled materials in art-making is not a novel practice, especially in cities like Cleveland, where artists mine the landscape for discarded industrial and consumer detritus, transforming and re-contextualizing the urban debris into sculptures, installations, and even elaborate costumes for avant-garde dance companies. In a society with a surfeit of over-packaged consumables, there is something admirable about recycling trash while producing art. And when an environment-consciousness artist is able to create something exquisitely beautiful out of post-consumer materials, the result is all the more stunning. Four Corners, the current SPACELab installation by Roscoe Wilson, perfectly exemplifies this kind of creative achievement.
Wilson, who is an assistant professor at Miami University in Hamilton, Ohio, has been collecting the objects in Four Corners since 2002. “The post-consumer materials came from my own personal use, as well as from my friends and family,” Wilson explains. “My interest in using things like bottle caps, cardboard, toilet paper and paper towel rolls, and cash-register receipt paper stems from my personal ethic of not wanting to add more products to the world, but to use what has already been produced — to rearrange it.” The artist also likes the idea that this body of work makes the people in his life think about how much they consume and what they throw away. “When they say, ‘Oh, I can’t throw that bottle cap away — I have to save it for Roscoe,’ the environment must sometimes enter their minds,” he says.
Environmental concerns aside, Wilson’s installation is visually stunning. The piece is perfectly lit, and the bright colors of the bottle caps and the subdued browns and tans of the cardboard boxes and toilet paper rolls magically meld together, creating a sort of three-dimensional painting. The objects are arranged methodically, by color, but also by shape. White empty paper rolls of varying sizes rise from a field of blue bottle caps like futuristic skyscrapers amidst a blue coastline, yet this figurative reference is slyly undermined by adjacent fields of vivid red, mustard yellow, and shades of white and gray bottle caps. While the environment is a central concern for Wilson, he is equally interested in aesthetics. “For me it is like painting,” the artist explains. “I am very attentive to color, shape, value, and visual organization, so there is a formal side to the work as well.”
While there is something especially chaotic about trash and our society’s mechanism for disposing of it, Wilson manages to impart visual order out of bedlam. The resulting installation is sublime and serenely lit, serving as a sort of mystical, even spiritual, setting. In transforming post-consumer waste into a well-ordered, dazzling visual oasis, Wilson destabilizes our culturally constructed conceptions of “garbage.” Here, multi-colored bottle caps sparkle, and pristine white paper towel rolls rise majestically in front of a curtain of elegantly unfurled white cash register tapes. Interestingly, however, viewers cannot enter the space, as the floor is entirely covered. To enter Four Corners would be to destroy Four Corners. The impenetrable installation therefore stands as a kind of utopian, human-free, visual environment. It would be naïve to suggest that we strive for a similar arrangement in the natural world. Instead, we might consider working toward what Wilson titled an earlier iteration of this installation series: Beautiful Consumption. Wilson’s SPACELab installation proves that these words — the ideas “beauty” and “consumption” — do not have to be diametrically opposed.