TRASH

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PLAY-FILL

Through humorous interventions and performances, Chris Sollars calls attention to the things we throw away.  Rather than telling the viewer what to think about trash, Sollars’s goal is to stimulate curiosity as a way of encouraging us to rethink the everyday world and consider the importance of the invisible and overlooked. In Play-Fill, Sollars creates a situation in which visitors are asked to think about the world from the perspective of a piece of trash.  By refocusing our point of view, Sollars spotlights a critical topic we would rather ignore and makes it personal. Set against the backdrop of a wall size photomural of San Diego’s Miramar Landfill, the installation places the visitor in an empathic position to trash. Visitors play on a dumpster converted into a playground and watch a video of trash falling from above while lying on the dumpster floor. The visitor is further connected to trash through an additional video, Pile Trash San Diego. The video follows a group of anthropomorphic trash bags on a journey between the former landfill at Balboa Park, through downtown San Diego to the Miramar Landfill. By focusing locally on San Diego landfill sites, Sollars challenges us to question our individual connection to trash and what becomes of it once it leaves our sight.

ABOUT CHRIS SOLLARS

Chris Sollars holds a BFA in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA from Bard College. Sollars’ work is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, and Miami Art Museum and was recently included in Bay Area Now 6 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. His documentary feature, C RED BLUE J screened at SFMOMA on Election Day 2008 and was included in Creative Time’s Democracy in America: Convergence Center, at the Park Armory in New York. Awards include 2002 Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, 2007 Alternative Exposure Grant, 2007 Eureka Fellowship Award, a 2007 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Grant, and 2009 Headlands residency.