Style

The Oakland Period

Reused, Recycled and Found Materials Define an Art Movement

    There’s no such thing as an unfinished beer in Oakland. That old TV on the corner? Not, in fact, useless. And that stack of old furniture on the curb could eventually end up in an art gallery. In Oakland, everything can become art, given motivated and mused manos.
    That’s because our fair city is awash in an artistic Renaissance, one born out of the fruits of dumpsters, and the leavings of an overproductive and undercreative society. Call it a green art movement, the very epitome of reuse: building beauty out of other people’s trash.
    Oakland’s burgeoning reuse movement has been in full swing now for more than three years. With new galleries sprouting up around the Art Murmur nexus at 23rd Street and Telegraph Avenue, and the galleries of Old Oakland joining in on the first Friday fun, there are more outlets for art in this city than ever. And that means there are more places to display the fruits of what has become known as the Oakland Reuse Movement.
    When the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts decided to feature members of the Oakland art movement, the gallery found itself playing host to all of the aforementioned junk and more. The gallery’s entryway was guarded by a two-story-high city facade constructed from cardboard boxes, duct tape and spray paint. One piece on display was simply an old television with a photo of an Oakland gutter pasted across the chipped screen. Other works featured soda cans, bottle tops, plastic bags and all manner of equipment normally tossed aside by our throwaway society.
    Why do artists like Ise Lyfe, Martin Webb, Christopher Weiss and Monica Reskala all use recycled and reused materials in their work? For more reasons than can easily be named. For a start, many Oakland artists are already a product of their environment simply by being in Oakland. Rents in San Francisco, and elsewhere in the Bay Area, are far too high for all but the most established of artists to afford. And studio space is even tougher to pay for, since most warehouses in San Francisco have long ago been converted into chic lofts.
    So the artists retreated to Oakland, where empty warehouses are abundant, and rents are slightly cheaper if you’re adventurous. But even the rents of Oakland aren’t low enough to leave room in many budgets for the paints, canvases, kilns and other artists’ tools. That’s why so many Oakland artists are taking inspiration from their workplace, from the street corner and from their own trashcans.
    Ise Lyfe is a native of Oakland. At 25, he’s been performing spoken word for eight years now. Only recently, however, has he also taken up the camera. In March, Lyfe’s work was shown at the Joyce Gordon Gallery on 14th Street in downtown Oakland. For Lyfe, it was his first art show, and for viewers, it was a window into Africa.
    Prior to his showing, Lyfe had returned from his first trip to Africa. He spent one month in Ghana, and he said it was a life-changing experience.
    “As soon as I got there, what was spinning in my head was finding a way to tangibly represent my experience there. I wanted to find a way to tangibly make a connection between the struggles we have here in Oakland and the beauty we have here in Oakland, and connect them to the struggles and the beauty of Africa. I wanted to do away with the negative perceptions that exist of Africa,” says Lyfe.
    With his photos complete and his poems ready, Lyfe went looking for frames at local framing shops. “The first thing I was doing was going to Aaron Brothers and looking at frames. The frames weren’t speaking to the photographs,” says Lyfe. “They were kind of commodifying the photos. I have a picture of a young girl using a pile of rubble as a bathroom, and putting that in a $150 frame just didn’t fit.”
    So, Lyfe decided to use found broken window frames and panes. He placed his images in these window frames as if they were the panes of glass. Surrounding those images with chipped wood, flakey faded paint, and glass sometimes jagged with breaks and cracks proved to be the final touch Lyfe need to bring home the power of his experience abroad.
    Martin Webb is also a traveler. He moved to the United States from England with the hopes of building a successful new life. Instead, he found himself spreading concrete flooring in condos and houses. But, like any good Oaklander (native or transplanted), Webb used his surroundings to fire art back into the forefront of his life.
    Webb used that very same concrete flooring to cover his canvases as a base coating for some of his paintings. Some of those canvases he augmented with slabs of wood and tiling found at his day job. The combination of these two materials gives Webb’s work a rustic feel, as though the images and shapes he produces were being created upon the side of a barn or the floor of an old building. Webb showed his work at the Esteban Sabar Gallery in March. Some of the pieces included hinges, nails, tools, and even a key that had been pressed into the concrete covering.
    Then there’s Christopher Weiss and Monica Reskala, who use salvaged wood to construct works of art off of which you can eat. They like to find large old pieces of wood with which to work. They then finish the wood and shape it into tables and other furniture. Weiss and Reskala work with their material, leaving the oddities and quirks of the medium in as they shape tables with jutting chestnut knots and sweeping curves. Weiss and Reskala are not just users of recycled materials; they let those materials’ shapes guide the finished product’s form.
    Why so much emphasis on reuse and recycling in the Oakland art movement? Lyfe sums it up with a connection to Africa, a continent whose people are known for reusing and recycling equipment and tools other cultures would have long considered to be trash.
    “I think it comes out of necessity,” says Lyfe, describing the motivations behind reuse in both Oakland and Africa. “It exists in the culture of people who live through poverty everywhere; where people are able to take something that is trash and make it marvelous. And not only make it something that can be used, but can be used as a piece of housing or a piece of art.”

—By Alex Handy

—Photography by Jan Stürmann