“If there is one place that never sleeps, it’s the dump. Being the final output of society, it constantly has to keep up with our waste.” — Erik Otto

Just south of America’s littlest big city, across the highway from where the 49ers play, a raucous city of refuse rages 24 hours a day, fed by a never-ending river of San Francisco’s garbage.

This is Recology, also known as the San Francisco dump.

Recology is on the front line of an effort by the city of San Francisco to achieve a state of garbage transcendentalism known as “Waste Zero” (nothing wasted, nothing buried, nothing burned). One innovative approach they have taken is to create an artist residency.

Artists are given studio space at the dump and given free reign to scour the landscape collecting whatever is useful to them in their process of creating artwork crafted from materials scavenged from San Francisco’s waste stream. Since 1990, 79 artists have participated in the program, transforming a generation’s trash into treasure.

The two current artists in residency, Erik Otto and Christina Mazza, will show their work this weekend at the Dump’s studio at 503 Tunnel Avenue in San Francisco.

During the residency, Christina Mazza photographed the many piles of raw materials she collected at the dump and posted them on her blog. One of those photos inspired Mazza’s wall mural of shredded packing paper (below).

Says Mazza:

At first, going to the Dump was overwhelming. I have scavenged for things before to include in my art, but there is a great variety of items that come through the Dump, which could have taken me in any number of different directions.

It is a literal transformation to take other peoples trash and turn it into art, but it is hopefully also an intellectual transformation in that the work itself transcends a personal message and becomes a more universal message that most people can relate to.

The core concept of the Dump’s residency, and the power of Mazza’s images, resonate immediately with my everyday experiences. I (and the other 6+ Billion people on earth) know exactly how much gets wasted and thrown away. I walk past it on the sidewalk, I see it floating in our streams, I see it peeking out of the sand. Mazza and Otto and the innovators at Recology are challenging us to think about whether we really need that second car, that third big screen TV, that 25th pair of jeans, that Wii.

Says Otto:

My goal with this body of work is to stimulate people to question their consumer habits as well as their personal life choices in comparison to a larger community. I am more optimistic now that the world is finally taking notice of the bigger issues of our over consumption habits and slowly things are taking change, but we’ve dug ourselves pretty deep, and it’s going take a while to get back out.

(Rebirth, by Erik Otto, House paint, spray paint, pencil, and collage on box panel. To see more work by Erik Otto and Christina Mazza, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

To be in the constant physical presence of society’s waste could easily conjure horrific images of humanity’s hubris. Or, seen through different eyes, it could inspire a person to believe it may be possible to convert all of it somehow back into something useful or beautiful.

Says Mazza:

I’ve experienced both emotions. Optimism, because it is a grounding experience that says that we [who] are all on this planet together need to tend to the care of its resources. Here in the Bay Area, the community takes this message seriously. I also think that at times, I was overwhelmed by the obvious consumerism of our culture. I bought very little over the course of my residency because of that. How much stuff do we really need in our lives, and at what cost to the environment, and inevitably ourselves?

Perhaps other cities will follow San Francisco’s lead and start artist residency programs at their own dumps.

Says Otto:

There is an abundance of great material going unused in every city and it would be interesting to see what artists in different cities would create based on the trash that’s specific to that area.

Waste Zero may be an ideology few care to pursue with vigor right now, but revolution is born in the lofty hearts and busy minds of the artists, and evolution begins in the swirling muck.

(To see more work by Erik Otto and Christina Mazza, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery, visit the Dump’s website here, or visit Erik Otto here, and Christina Mazza here.)