THE WASTE OF ONE YEAR (2008). The project began with the commitment to save all of my trash for 1 year and make art out of it. On Day 2, when my housemate made me dinner, I was posed with an expectable but surprising question: is the waste created hers or mine? What followed was a yearlong, multimedia research investigation in the limits of personal responsibility as a strategy for confronting ecological crisis-- yearning to articulate the many ways we are all interconnected in our perpetuation and struggle against the crisis of our physical world.
Above, images from the culimating 8 room installation. Below, my mother, Donna Schragis, tours the space.
My mother's home movie was a much better representation of this project than any of my attempts at empirical documentation. This is a lesson in objectivity: it does not exist.
The Waste of One Year was my senior thesis at Bard College in 2008. It consisted of a series of interconnected installations in a 20'x15'x13' room.
The names of the different projects are:
Downstairs:Entryway for Awe, Sorting Station for Clarity, Naming Office, Bunker for Aesthetic Self-Protection.
Upstairs: Altars to Self-Implication, Bridge of Beauty as Optimism Made Physical, Plastic Library for Archives and Bibliography.
More at www.rachelschragis.com