It’s tempting to reduce what artist Kalliopi Monoyios does down to the cliche of “turning trash into treasure,” because she does make works of art out of the things that people throw away.
Endless single-use plastics: the familiar packaging that holds Doritos, diapers, Oreos, soda pop, toilet paper, coffee, bread, dish soap, tortillas and juice; extension cords, telephone and speaker wire; tape, chewing gum, mesh and fiber; and yards and yards of dental floss. Her media is excess.
If you go
“Patterns of Consumption” continues through June 26 at the Littleton Museum, 6028 S. Gallup St., Littleton. Info: littletongov.org.
She weaves, twists and turns, collages and embroiders refuse into sculptures and wall hangings, mock mosaics and abstract geometric paintings. Each piece is colorful and clever, brilliant and eye-catching.
But taken in together at her new exhibition at the Littleton Museum, they are less like gems we want to live with and more like horrors we would be better off without.
There is a weird sort of alchemy going on with all of the objects featured in “Patterns of Consumption” because they transform viewers as well. They pull us in with glee and then wreck us with guilt.
Take the show’s centerpiece, titled “Year of Plastic, Family of Four,” which is made, as that straightforward title suggests, from all of the single-use plastic a local family saved — instead of discarded — from January through December 2019. It is full of vivid, cheery hues: Chips Ahoy! blue, Reese’s orange, Twizzlers red, Lay’s yellow, Snickers brown.
Monoyios lays it all out flat, one piece next to the other, into a field of crinkly plastic stretching 26 feet high and 26 feet wide. It covers a large wall of the Littleton Museum’s art gallery and spreads out in orderly tentacles onto the floor. At 676 square feet, the piece is monumental in scale and full of excitement.
But it’s also full of dismay, since you quickly realize everything here would end up in a landfill if it was not rescued in the name of art. Does every household produce that amount of unrecyclable trash? Well, yes; that’s the point.
Monoyios uses the same tactic across the exhibition. There’s “Gyre,” a foot-tall sculpture, set on a pedestal, that curves around and folds in on itself. It’s one of those 3D art pieces that begs you to spend a little time, determining where it starts and stops, which side is the front and which is the back. But the joy lightens when you see that it is made from Amazon delivery envelopes and Charmin tissue packaging.
There is also “Drops in the Ocean,” which reconfigures potato chip, ice cream and dried fruit bags into a series of interlocking circles that come together into a wall-mounted assemblage measuring 10 feet wide and 5 feet tall.
The impact of her work ultimately arrives in the glut of it all. So much stuff. So pretty. So disgusting, too.
Monoyios goes as far as she can with this, and sometimes farther than she should. Her pieces really are attractive in their way; and they are often too much fun to gaze at. It’s easy to worry that she is too cunning for her own good — glorifying this junk by turning it into the raw material for precious goods; likable things instead of littler. Wouldn’t she make the same point by just throwing it all into messy piles, letting it be ugly and stubborn rather than the stuff of an art gallery?
But she is on a mission, of course, to make people see themselves — or, at the very least, their bad habits. Or, at the very most, the danger that all of us are to our own planet. Would anyone pay attention if she didn’t turn it into eye candy? That is a question that lingers over this exhibition — and it is not easy to answer.
What is easy is the staring and the wonder, especially with the exhibition’s more delicate pieces, the two series of framed wall-hangings she titles “Strings of Things” and “Collections of Things.” For these objects, Monoyios employs dental floss as thread and embroiders it onto 11-by-14 inch paper into pure geometric shapes. Everything is white-on-white, and the works feel old and new at the same time — because they simultaneously refer to the ancient craft of sewing and 20th-century abstract painting.
Similarly, there are pieces like “Landlines,“ which reconfigures discarded telephone and stereo wires, painted white, into small circles that are then arranged into something resembling a basket — again, there is a timelessness, with the traditional form of weaving connected to the pure geometry of modern art.
The pieces give the show depth and, set among the larger and more colorful objects made from product packaging, demonstrate the artist’s range and vision. She is thinking deeply about her raw material and putting in the labor, both body and mind, to develop her ideas fully. The presence of old and new characteristics in the work also gives viewers more entry points to the show: Some folks will be attracted by the similarity to the handicrafts they might practice themselves, others by the garish, over-the-top installations more often found in museums and high-end galleries.
Some people will just want to head to the nearest 7-Eleven for Jelly Bellies and Canada Dry ginger ale.
And in that way, Monoyios — and “Patterns of Consumption” as a whole — succeeds with great effect. It is the kind of show you want to see, and you want to bring your kids and friends to see, because there is little bit of a thrill for everyone in the room.
And then, yes, a little terror, too.
