One Man's Waste is Another Man's Warhol
by Steffani Jemison
Like Barrish, Carpenter believes that refuse, rescued from the dump, is better than brand new. Although he just started the residency a few weeks ago, but he's made some major scores, including 170 feet of snow tire chains (“I love the texture”), which he transformed into a giant snowball. He also nabbed a beautiful old standing swing for babies (“a fabulous blue with war marks on it”) that he used to construct what he describes as a sort of “tornado.” In fact, the hardest thing about his new position, Carpenter says, is having to let amazing materials go because he can't immediately imagine a good use for them. “Yesterday I found 5000 cell phone covers, all different colors,” he says, and regrets having let them go. “I should have kept them,” he laments. Now, of course, they're lost forever, buried under tons—literally—of trash.
“Elegant,” is how Carpenter describes his style, explaining “I manipulate the metal so that you see the sculpture long before you recognize what the material is.” In Carpenter's work, it's impossible to guess the original components from looking at the finished product, and he likes it that way. His Dallas gallery avoids describing him as a “recycled artist” because, he says, “people in Dallas like brand new, shiny art.” He does keep a (deliberately 
shortsighted) eye on the bottom line. “Sometimes I do use materials because they're easier to sell in a gallery,” he admits. “I love using things like cigarette butts and pantyhose and fun things, but they don't sell very well. So I try to make some fun pieces that I like and some pieces to sell.” And it works—Carpenter has been making a living exclusively from his art for fifteen years.
Carpenter denies that his work is overtly political, but he does admit that he “[has] a big thing about trash. I don't like people to pollute.” To him, working with found materials just makes sense. “It just works—my materials are full of life, I'm doing things for the community. And I just can't stand it when people throw things away.”
New Jersey-based artist David Poppie also has a thing about trash: “I recycle the paper that comes with fortune cookies,” he says, with neither irony nor shame. Poppie makes two-dimensional collages and, more recently, sculptures out of recycled materials, usually featuring consumer goods like six-pack holders, paper coffee cups, and plastic spoons.
Well, actually…the materials in his work aren't always recycled, Poppie admits. “Every once in a while for sanitary reasons or aesthetic reasons, I use new things, but I feel guilty about it,” he says. “For instance, I did a big installation piece with about 2500 spoons, but they had to be new—for a minute I thought about finding used spoons, but it woiuld be kind of gross.” The piece was inspired, Poppie says, by the spoons he got with his Chinese carryout.
The politics in his work are subtle, according to Poppie. “For example, the six-pack holders. You're going to see 2500 or more, and you're going to be thinking in your head, ‘God, where did he find 2500 of those things? And then you'll think about how many of them are made every year.”
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