Lately, I’ve been lightheartedly teasing myself that my interest in art history is really just a front for hoarding tendencies. At the end of the day, art history gives me an excuse to hold onto all the little bits of ephemera that course through the life cycle of any exhibition I come across: press releases, printed statements, postcards, inventory tags, even sometimes the packaging that the work for a show was delivered with. I tell myself that all of these things, maybe not today but sometime in the future, are (or will become) vital to remembering this present moment. That one day, some bright-eyed art history student will beg to see the inventory number of one specific painting from one specific month, and I’ll be able to produce it with ease so that they can finish their term paper. Yes, of course, the art in the show itself is valuable. But the detritus that comes from the daily ins and outs of everything around the exhibition is, in my opinion, equally as important as the exhibition itself.

Yet at the end of the day, a lot of it is trash. Or rather, it becomes trash, depending on who’s looking at it and from what angle. The adage that “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure” operates in both directions here, as objects teeter on the fence between useful and useless, easily tipped one way or the other by affect forces of value, power, and sentiment. Questions of this fine line between trash and treasure and the conditions that position them as such give life to Waste Scenes, a new body of work at Oregon Contemporary by artists Maia Chao and Fred Schmidt-Arenales, curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin. Presenting Waste Scenes consists of a two-channel video installation accompanied by a series of prints, three wall drawings, and a movie poster. Taken together, these pieces offer viewers non-linear stories about trash, deterioration, and the fragility of capital power in our attempts to distinguish art object from waste. 

Except for a movie poster (that was designed in collaboration with Kristian Henson), all of the work in Waste Scenes was sourced from or produced at a construction and demolition waste recycling facility in northeast Philadelphia as part of the Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR) program that Chao and Schmidt participated in back in the summer of 2022. Much like Portland’s own GLEAN program, RAIR artists are provided with a studio and access to nearly 500 tons of discarded material each day gathered from the Tri-state area. Utilizing the massive stream of debris (that ends up containing anything from abandoned office furniture to slabs of drywall to tangled messes of wire) to source materials for their work, the residency encourages participating artists to approach their studio practice with an eye toward sustainability by pushing them to take deeper considerations of where and how they both gather and dispose of their materials. 

Originally, Chao and Schmidt-Arenales had plans to produce and execute a live performance while in residence – however, logistical realities including the dump’s hours of operation limiting the window of safe supervision (the site is, after all, an extremely active processing facility) necessitated a slight shift in plans. They pivoted by gathering as many things that they found interesting as they could – not just objects, but video footage and recorded sounds – building an “archive” (in the loosest sense of the term) of, well, trash. They also began filming experiments and performances, building scores for action from the various things they found, such as texts from human resources manuals and corporate de-escalation training videos. 

For its life at Oregon Contemporary, McLaughlin worked with Chao and Schmidt-Arenales to organize Waste Scenes around a two-channel video installation presented as a pair of screens of dramatically different sizes – the core result of their residency experiments –  flanked by a selected series of prints and wall drawings (Waste Scenes has a fraternal twin counterpart currently on exhibition at Boston Center for Arts, featuring a different set of prints and wall drawings and additional live performance programming, but still organized around the same video installation.) A couple benches and a shag rug create a comfortable viewing area that faces a large projection screen, supported by wooden billboard scaffolding, that towers next to a small cathode-ray tube (CRT) television, which appears comically small in comparison. The CRT television (which was sourced from the Philadelphia dump site) functions as one of the two channels, cutting between snippets of footage from a human resources training video (also found at the dump) and still images of book covers and illustrations. 

The projection screen, which sits directly to the left of the television, presents the other channel: an approximately 45-minute film of vignettes that the artists scored and filmed around the facility during their residency. The film cycles through a stream of seemingly non sequitur clips: quiet panning shots of the active facility; solo and group performances of choir singers in high-visibility safety gear; an argument between two corporate managers clad in power suits (performed by actors Bellisant Corcoran-Mathe and Parker Sera) over the “meaning” of a directive to lay off employees. Interspersed are moments where empty office chairs and potted plants are arranged into makeshift office waiting rooms, situated amidst piles of rubbish. Following no clear narrative and moving in and out of sync with each other, the two screens juggle images that touch the high-energy promises of corporate life as well as the hollow, ghostly remains of its failures. 

When I spoke with the artists about their time at RAIR and the development of the exhibition, Chao expressed to me how struck she was by the experience of watching things get pulverized and crushed at the recycling facility– less in awe of the brute force of the machinery, and more so by the emotion of the whole process. Watching things get broken down each day while in residence, Chao and Schmidt-Arenales took an interest in the process of deterioration, using it to help score some of the scenes in the film. In one vignette, opera-trained singer Dan Schwartz and members of the Philadelphia Voices of Pride choir gather around the scoop of one of the facility’s backhoe loaders, arranging themselves as if on their usual risers for rehearsal. Dropping or omitting words and playing with tempo and holds, the choir’s song falls apart, performing the deterioration process by breaking down the original score into unrecognizable to the original whole.

By scoring performances with the process of deterioration in mind, thereby encouraging a decomposition of their musical and textual arrangements, it becomes apparent that Chao and Schmidt-Arenales are developing a correlation between artwork (their performances) and trash (that which has succumbed to deterioration). And this comparison, as a result, throws into question where and how value is distributed – if the two are the same, why do we give value to the work of art and not the piece of trash? One can argue that the work of art, although performatively the same as the broken down piece of trash, is given its value because it signifies a kind of usefulness – whether utilitarian, decorative, intellectual, cultural, or otherwise. In contrast, the piece of trash is denied value because of perceived uselessness – it has deteriorated to the point where its constitutive elements are unrecognizable to its original functioning whole, and therefore unable to perform the labor expected of it.

On surrounding walls of the gallery space, framed inkjet prints of astoundingly sharp clarity display some of the objects from the gathered archive including a vinyl recording of Malcolm McLaren’s electronic interpretation of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, weathered copies of Neuropsychological Assessment by Muriel Lezak and The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom with torn dust jackets, and what appears to be a library copy of a VHS tape titled “DE-ESCALATION TAPES – VOLUME 2.” Resisting the impulse to take these found-object prints as mere documentation of the artists’ archive allows them to perform a similar disruption of the system of value allocation that the video installation offers by toying further with the trash/treasure transitive formula. What were once useful objects in their first life then became trash upon their deterioration and disposal, which once more transform into treasured art objects in a third life. As a result, the prints seem to tease their viewers – or perhaps more specifically their collectors – with a question of the potency of their value allocation by moving the target. The line between art object and trash is once again rendered thin and permeable.

Often, I find that when I encounter work like Waste Scenes – work that is driven so deeply by institutional and societal critique – I always crave some kind of solution to the broken system(s) it addresses – in this case, the hollowness of power disguised as intrinsic value that capitalist systems (such as the art world) structure as gospel truth, demonstrated by the tension (and, perhaps, absurdity) of presenting trash as art. It’s easy to point fingers or to justify actionless criticism with the intention of raising awareness, but it’s rather difficult to offer something in return, especially a solution that is realistic, practical, and executable. As such, I left the exhibition impulsively asking myself: is there a solution to be gleaned from Waste Scenes?

While I somehow doubt it, I don’t find that to be a hindrance to appreciating what Chao and Schmidt-Arenales are working through. It’s quite the opposite – Waste Scene’s open-ended nature and happenstance comedy through apparent absurdity found in the non sequitur prove effective because it is precisely where we find ourselves in the absurdity of our late-stage capitalist society. Whether intentional or not, Chao and Schmidt-Arenales have set themselves up precisely in a situation in which the offer of a solution isn’t the central or driving goal of the work – nor is it the intention of simply raising awareness of the frailness of capital power. I would imagine that any solution that the artists could offer to quell the beast of neoliberal capitalism would be extremely vulnerable to the neverending cycle of empty promises they’re pointing at with Waste Scenes. Temporary solutions, after all, are only temporary – a band-aid on a burst pipe can only hold on for so long before it falls off and becomes, well, trash.

The work in Waste Scenes finds its potency in its ability to self-reflect, to be aware of the systems it works within all the while maintaining a critical eye turned equally on itself. Where parts of Chao and Schmidt-Arenales’s film, its pendant found video footage, or the minimal presentation of the prints feel absurd or undecipherable, perhaps it’s because the greater forces at play that coordinate their commodity or use value are just as absurd.

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Waste Scenes is curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin and is on view at Oregon Contemporary through March 9, 2025. Oregon Contemporary is located at 8371 N Interstate Avenue. The gallery is open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from noon to 5pm and by appointment.