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September 30, 2004 - Oregonian Living Section story about SCRAP's Annual Fundraising Event, Iron Arist. Text of the article featured below. OPB story about P:EAR which features SCRAP--with soundhttp://www.publicbroadcasting.net/opb/news Text of the article featured below. Reuse, recycle and trick-or-treat Using ingenuity and little cash, families create Halloween costumes from castoffs at SCRAP Thursday, October 27, 2005 JOHN FOYSTON The Oregonian If it wasn't one thing it was another Saturday for volunteer Heather Maharry: No sooner had she finished building an octopus than she had to start rummaging around for the raw materials to make an elephant. Luckily, she was in rummagers' Valhalla: the North Williams Avenue headquarters of the School and Community Reuse Action Program. SCRAP, a nonprofit group, keeps about 30 tons of safe, reusable material out of landfills every year and sells it cheap to schools and community projects. Maharry, a hardened veteran of SCRAP's previous pre-Halloween costume workshops, was unfazed by the commotion of a couple of dozen kids and parents rummaging for materials and inspiration. And let's just note that if they couldn't find several metric tons of both at the SCRAP store last Saturday, they weren't looking. The Scrappers had collected bins and barrels of old clothing, masks, pirate hooks, red Power Ranger gloves, unused bits of packaging, carpet and tile samples and other extremely miscellaneous costume parts. "Oooh, Asha, look at this," Katie Abrams, 5, told her older sister. "Little foamy things!" Indeed, several 30-gallon drums of little foamy things -- blue, pink and yellow triangles. But it was the drum of black plastic tubing that eventually caught the fancy of 7-year-old Asha Abrams. "So far I've made a couple of swords, a magic wand and now an octopus," Maharry said, as she and Asha spiral-wrapped green tape on the lengths of black corrugated plastic tube that would soon be the young lady's tentacles. Meanwhile, Seth McFarlane, 6, had a way to go on pulling his pirate costume together. In fact, all he had so far was one fairly girlie pink plastic open-toe shoe that didn't make the final cut. But he had plans. "Since I'm going to be a pirate, I'm going to let this tooth rot out," he said, pointing to a serviceable-looking incisor. "Yeah," said older brother Simon. "No tooth-brushing until after Halloween." Dad Andy Fridley, clutching an armload of zombie makeup for Simon's Halloween turn as a member of the undead, said it was the family's first excursion to the SCRAP workshop. "Usually we've just scrapped around the house," he said. "At the last minute, of course, so the glue is still drying. Or we've gone to thrift stores a couple of times, but this is great." Especially at the cash register. "How much is this?" asked Jacob Kandolf, 10. He meant his costume, which comprised a hooded black cape, a white plastic Jason mask, a plastic dinosaur claw and a rubber meat cleaver. "Oh, about a million bucks," said Joanna Dyer, who runs the SCRAP store. "How does that sound?" But she caved in quickly enough, though it meant forgoing the chance to earn several years of SCRAP's operating budget with one sale. "How about 2 bucks?" "It's our first time at SCRAP, and this place is awesome," said mom Genevieve Kandolf as she paid the $10.75 tab. That covered the costumes of Jacob and his two siblings: Josh (black-suited ninja with silver sword and Power Ranger gloves) and Krista (a princess in diaphanous yellow, clutching a star-tipped wand). "You can't go to a store and get one costume for that kind of money," Kandolf said. Cheap is good, but getting involved with the materials -- making something with your imagination and your hands and society's castoffs -- is SCRAP's real message, and people were getting it Saturday. "I'll never buy a Halloween costume again," said Kisha Weatherbee, an art student at Portland State University. "This is so much more fun. I always used to worry that I'd have to sew if I made my own costume, but now I know that staples, tape and glue work just fine." John Foyston: 503-221-8368; johnfoyston@news.oregonian.com ©2005 The Oregonian This article was featured in the Living Section of the Oregonian: Scrappy artistry Thursday, September 30, 2004 JOHN FOYSTON Whatever the Iron Artists endured last Saturday evening, they did not do so in isolation. Nine teams of as many as a dozen artists each signed up to build sculptures out of junk in a show billed as equal parts "Iron Chef" and "Junkyard Wars. The event was a benefit for the School and Community Reuse Action Program, or Scrap, a nonprofit group that keeps safe, reusable material out of landfills and sells it cheap to schools and community projects (www.scrapaction.org). The teams arrayed themselves at long tables in the closed-off section of Northeast Russell Street in front of Disjecta, the independent art center. When the bell went off, they would have about three hours to turn the boxes of junk under their table into sculptures that best exemplified the theme of "flight." As they waited, they busied themselves arranging rolls of duct tape, boxes of drywall screws, glue (epoxy, Krazy and hot), paint, wire, finishing nails, hammers, saws, drills and pliers on the tables, which were covered with recycled architectural drawings. Tchotchke girl Katie Evans circulated through the crowd with a tray of jewelry and journals made by Scrap volunteers, while other volunteers handed out Scrap brochures. The Trash Mountain Boys, a band as well as a team, set up in the beer garden. Other teams discussed strategy, finished an illicit bottle of wine, put the finishing touches on costumes and made grand entrances: "Get out of our way," bellowed one of the phalanx of batting-helmeted guys trooping into the enclosure, "Get out of our way," he said, speaking through an orange traffic cone megaphone. They were a gaggle of sculptors and such called Lensbabies.com, and they wore matching T-shirts stenciled with the word "Used." Like many other teams, they had more than the five people allowed to work at any one time. Those supernumeraries served as cheerleaders, relief crew and water carriers, as they did on other teams. Unlike other teams, the Lensbabies were led by a man in a kilt and a long pink wig: Portland sculptor Paul Arensmeyer. Which is not to imply that everybody else wore Dockers or plaid skirts with knee socks. The Laurelthirst Public House team wore mufti, as did the Creative Force folks, But the Creative Resource Application Posse from Gallery 500 wore white coveralls decorated with acrylic paint and slashes, and the Screechers wore striped jerseys and tights and grass-skirt-like garments made of unused zippers. (They also occasionally wove through the crowd in a screeching conga line until they nearly got gigged for leaving the table during competition. Screech breaks thereafter were conducted in situ.) Four-oh-seven p.m.: Just 10 more scrap minutes before the start. (Not really -- things ran late enough that Scrap Time became a sort of joke, but nobody seemed to mind much.) Bobby Soxx and Joanna Dyer -- who runs the Scrap store and whose normal outfit apparently does not include the high-heeled white go-go boots, silvery Mylar cocktail dress and long brown fall she wore Saturday -- served as announcers and color commentators. They briefed the contestants on the rules: No more than five people working at the table at any one time. No looking at the materials before the start. All sculptures had to be three feet or less on a side. And each team had to schlep its sculpture upstairs at 7 p.m. for judging. (The team from P:ear, the art and education program for homeless and transitional kids, would win top honors at the end of the night and the Cup d' Scrap, a wastebasket bedizened with Mardi Gras beads and costume jewelry brooches and filled with carnations and a mannequin arm.) "OK," Dyer said as the start loomed, "each team should have some metal frames, a wooden drawer, a cabinet door and some magazines. You should have a paper bag full of foamy bits and a pink plastic bin with a foot and some plastic tires . . ." And so much more: bundles of bike spokes; plastic cylinders; trays of 50 quarter-sized lithium batteries; old National Geographics; a table leg; a rearview mirror; spools of wire; rivets; a transformer; the meter from a metal detector; Tazo tea stickers; bottle caps; tea strainers; plumbing bits; bags of latex bands. "The theme is flight," said one guy on the Gallery 500 team. "We should build a 747 out of all this. See . . . we could take this framework and make the cockpit out of it." The other team members weren't so sure. They appeared to be stunned into inaction by the midden of junk on the table before them. Except for Miriam Fuerle, who seemed to remember that Chinese proverb about the longest journey beginning with strapping two latex bands together. "You've got to make bigger things out of smaller things," she said, as she threaded latex straps onto bike spokes. "You've just got to start making something or it's just too overwhelming." The Scrap store is at 3901-A N. Williams Ave. and is open Wednesdays-Sundays; 503-294-0769. Copyright 2004 Oregon Live. All Rights Reserved. From Scrap Into Art By Adam Chavez PORTLAND, OR 2003-08-19 The teenagers are part of PEAR, which stands for Program: Education Arts and Recreation. They recently went to a recycling center in North Portland that's been providing used materials to youth arts projects since 1997. 19-year-old Adam Chavez is our tour guide. The people who work at SCRAP have what others may consider a strange job. But they say they wouldn't want to work anywhere else. Peterson: My name is Teri Thomas Peterson and I'm the executive director of SCRAP--the School and Community Reuse Action Project. Our mission is to divert materials from the waste stream and at the same time offer creative inspiration for their reuse. When I walk through the door, the first thing you see is the crazy artwork made out of garbage, hanging all around the counter area. Peterson: Ok, are you ready, honey?Customer: Yeah. Peterson: Looks like a dollar to me.Customer: All right! Sold! Peterson: You got yourself a deal girl!Customer: Excellent! As I move back towards the little kitchen filled with coffee cups and tea, I enter the art room where people can come and use art supplies and the space for free. Philomel: My name is Philomel. I'm the person responsible for wandering through and finding strange pieces of this and that and putting it together in a fine art format . Right now, I'm trimming up donated pieces of torn mat board and just by making a clean edge, I'll then make them usable for smaller-size pieces of artwork. The other rooms in SCRAP have a kind of yard sale sort of feel. All manner of odds and ends, from trophies to bottle caps, bits of string and old photographs all in their own little piles, everywhere. Teri introduced me to each and every one of them. Peterson: We have our bin wall, where we have bins of miscellaneous items, such as water bottles, we have spools, we have the end caps for banner rolls, we have small bottles of acrylic craft paint, currently we have an assortment of plastic yo-yos, we've got twisty dies, organically grown twisty dies, we've got glass lenses and parts, hair stuff. I asked Philomel and Teri about some of the strange things that end up here. Philomel: Boy, I have found some really unusual things, like hospital signs, like the urine specimen drop-off sign, that was pretty unusual Peterson: We have a bag of hair over there, which I don't know how that that slipped in (laughs) Customer: Do you take anybody too?Peterson: We do, but all individual donations must be pre-approved. So, give us a call Customer: Got it!Peterson: We wanna avoid anything unclean or unsafe and if it can go somewhere else we have other resources that we can refer you to.Customer: OK, great! SCRAP helps students get what they need for their projects at school. McLaughlin: I'm Heather McLaughlin, I'm a print making major and I can use paper for my lithographs for my etchings and stuff like that. Philomel says even teachers can be found at SCRAP. Philomel: All kinds of creative people, from ... let me see, film makers, a lot of art teachers, a lot of art students, people who are making projects for Burning Man, The Magazine Symposium Frieda S.: My name is Frieda S., I work for Metro, which is the regional government here in the Portland metropolitan area and I do waste reduction education programs in schools. I bought mailing tubes and I'm going to turn when you have kids you make rain sticks, do you know what rain sticks are, you put like rice or things inside and when you kind of turn them they make this soothing sound. Other soothing sounds include the wind chimes hanging from the ceiling. Philomel and Teri show me their display wall of art projects created from SCRAP materials. Philomel: I see people all the time making jewelry out of strange pieces of hardware and I see people taking broken CDs and making beautiful works of sculpture. Teri: We like to come up with ideas for the harder to use items and we provide information sheets that have project plans on them. Philomel: There's really no end to just, I don't know, just the magic of experimenting, just trying new things. I think we live in a really inhibited society that doesn't know how to use its resources effectively. I think because of lack of imagination, things are just thrown away instead of put to good use. Teri: We actually pick through everything that we sweep and we find all kinds of buttons and clasps and things that have found their way onto the floor and we pick all of that up, we call that scrapple (laughs) At SCRAP, there's no such thing as garbage. Theo, a return customer says she thinks everything can be creatively reused. Theo: My mind is going on crazy trying to create, so I will definitely be back! (laughs) And it's customers like Theo who help scrap keep about 64,000 pounds of materials out of landfills every year. | |
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