Cardboard Consumer

Your eye catches snippets of text on cardboard boxes—Ultra Clorox, Inhalation Hazard, Huggies, HP Printer, Act II Popcorn, and Corrosive. No, you are not lost in the aisles of Sam’s Wholesale; you are in an art installation.

Pause for a moment to think of just a few of the things you consume. Food, beverages, computers, cleaning products, microwaves, bread machines, copier paper, motor oil . . . the list is infinite. All of these multifarious items are packaged and shipped in cardboard boxes. After their brief period of usefulness, those boxes are cut down, bundled together, and packed up for recycling by the retailer or carried home by the consumer to be set out in the green bin or tossed out in the weekly garbage.

Artist Phoebe Washburn is a recycler par excellence and the creator of “True, False, and Slightly Better,” an over-the-top, jaw-dropping installation at Rice Gallery. Washburn scavenges cardboard boxes from retailers, sidewalks, and alleys. Enticed by the spare beauty of the material, she keeps the box exteriors and printing as they are, but with a nod to the decorative, she paints the interior sides in colors straight out of suburban living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens, and baths. The paint itself is a form of recycling/artist economy. Washburn uses those $5 Home Depot mistints—paint gallons people returned because the colors weren’t quite right.

For her installation, Washburn filled Rice Gallery with a swirling mass of cardboard—nearly 7,000 pounds of it, collected over a year’s time. Starting at the top of the 16-foot gallery walls, Washburn and 11 assistants screwed flat sections of cardboard boxes on top of each other in layers, like horizontal shingles. The team ran through 70,000 drywall screws. The cordless screwdriver casualty rate, however, is not known. Working inward from the outer walls, the entire mass gradually moves down and converges in the center in swirls and eddies. It looks like an overachieving, obsessive-compulsive homeless person has been at work fabricating a makeshift shelter from found materials.

The utterly overwhelming scale imparts a tremendous visual power to the piece. Washburn has given us a spiraling vortex of consumer products, frozen in time. Imagine a stop-action photo of a tornado hitting a paper recycling plant. The whole thing seems so kinetic, yet it doesn’t move. Sitting against the back wall, you can believe time has stopped one bare moment before this avalanche of consumer need engulfs you. But with all the drywall screws anchoring the thing together, the impression is imaginary.

The dim, cave-like space is sporadically lit with clamp lamps, and to better view the chaos, the artist incorporated into the work a six-foot-high platform constructed from scaffolding and accessible via a staircase. The more intrepid could climb a free-standing ladder for an additional vantage point.

Washburn created visual rhythm by interspersing mint greens, pale pinks, and oranges amongst the brown cardboard. Yellow construction flags were randomly inserted into the mass, sticking up out of it like tiny warning indicators. You feel like you could be sucked into the vortex, but its beauty doesn’t seem ominous. Giving up and diving into the land of lost consumer products suddenly has a seductive, siren-like lure. Washburn has conjured an unexpected elegance from our detritus, and somehow, there is something oddly comforting about it.

From below you can see that the entire assemblage remains true to Washburn’s aesthetic of rig-job, makeshift construction. Wandering around, the massive conglomeration seems to be comically shored up by everything from scaffolding to folding chairs and bags of Sakrete to taped-together 2 X 4s and boxes of drywall screws. It’s a seat-of-the-pants, whatever’s-on-hand school of construction that results in creatively utilitarian solutions—or at least the impression of such.

Washburn gives us an uncommon beauty that veils an in-your-face confrontation with our insatiable consumer desires. Through sheer accumulation and her deft sculptural sense, she has created something phenomenal by presenting us with the gathered husks of our own greedy needs, in decorator colors.

— Kelly Klaasmeyer