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The Garbage Phoenix, a Gift From São Paulo
The garbage phoenix, as it appeared Wednesday night. It was still a day away from completion.
Rodrigo Machado and Pado (who only uses one name) came to Toronto—and, in fact, to North America—for the first time last week, and so far what they’ve done, mostly, is pick up our trash. This is not some solid-waste management outsourcing scheme. It’s sculpture.
The São Paulo–based duo, known collectively as Urban Trash Art, got their start about two-and-a-half years ago, using waste left over from their work as set builders for large events. Later, they began to incorporate street trash into their practice.
On Wednesday evening, Joshua Barndt, co-director of the Whippersnapper Gallery—which supports emerging artists and whose patronage and grant money helped bring Urban Trash Art to Toronto as part of the gallery’s summer programming series—led us into an empty lot behind a Latin American food court on Augusta Avenue, where the pair were at work.
To the lot, usually reserved for parked cars, Machado and Pado had brought heaps of stuff gathered over the course of three days from streets and alleys in and around Kensington Market. Using only that and some nails, screws, and tape, they were in the process of fashioning a sculpture of a phoenix, two or three times as tall as a person, with wings of scavenged boards, doors, and broken skylights, and an arcing beak that incorporates bike tires, chairs, and an old mop. Other things are attached in odd places: an orange chair that was thrown out by a nearby coffee shop, a busted manual typewriter, old electronics, and a pink child’s piano. The overall effect was somewhere between “work of art” and “sentient yard sale.”
Machado (left) and Pado (right) are the artists behind Urban Trash Art.
Machado, a laid-back guy who wore glasses and had mutton-chop sideburns connected by a moustache, explained his process, while Pado—tall, lanky, tattooed, and not an English speaker—sat nearby and interjected at strategic moments, in Portuguese.
“All these things, it’s like the ashes, you know? And we make the phoenix,” Machado said, gesticulating broadly while smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. “The phoenix was born from the ashes.”
By Machado’s count, he and Pado have worked on 27 pieces so far, the Augusta Avenue phoenix being their second-largest. The decision to start using trash as an artistic medium was partly an economic one.
“When we start to work, we don’t have money to buy the things,” he explained. Trash, meanwhile, was free. “We just start to work with this. And we never stop.” As time went on, they began to ponder the politics of reusing discarded materials. Now, they’re beginning to receive grants and commissions. Photos of their work in Brazil are available on their blog.
Pado makes some changes to the maquette, essentially a blueprint for the sculpture. It, too, was made of garbage.
Aside from the fact that it doesn’t cost anything, trash also has the distinct advantage of being available nearly anywhere humans are. Toronto’s is apparently pretty similar to São Paulo’s in most respects, though Machado is blown away by the number of hockey sticks they’ve been finding, some of which have become supports for the bird’s beak.
Also, there are all the couches. “Joshua said to us, ‘Don’t take the couches, because of the bedbugs, you know?'” said Machado. “But this, in São Paulo, we don’t find it.”
Bedbugs?
“No, no. Cushions.”
Machado expects the phoenix to be complete by Thursday. Its wings will serve as a bandstand for a free party being thrown by Whippersnapper Gallery to coincide with Kensington Market’s next pedestrian Sunday, on July 31. There will be music and, we’re told, “surprises.” The lot is behind 214 Augusta Avenue and the festivities start at 3 p.m.
Photos by Eric Yip/Torontoist.