Ann Wizer: Invisible

Ann Wizer
INVISIBLE
unseen people unseen waste

Galleria Duemila
October 3-31, 2008

Ann Wizer is from the US but has called Asia her home for over two decades, having lived in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia. As a visual artist always concerned with fine craftsmanship, she has worked with painting, photography, installations, theater collaborations, costume design and sculpture. Being also an environmentalist and activist, she uses post-consumer waste as her primary art material, seeing it as, “the most obvious way to address issues of environmental abuse.”

Unintentionally at first, she has long worked with debris - first from nature then later from industry. In Japan in the 1980s she collected odd bits of nature from garden cuttings to used, wooden, disposable chopsticks (washed, of course) and found interest in the cultural significance of these materials. In the Philippines she used again what she found around her: rice, spices, earth, grasses, tropical foliage and strewn birds’ nests after typhoons. Eventually, her despair for the loss of that nature from rampant, unmonitored damage, lead her to address the deeper complexities: the politics of the environment, squarely confronting those issues by using mainly plastic trash in her creations. Over the 1990s her environmental works were fused with ironic humor to spotlight the careless disregard of big industries for their non-existent waste management, or what she calls “CSI: Corporate Social Irresponsibility”. On moving to Jakarta in 2000 she turned towards finding “positive solutions” instead of simply making sarcastic, disgruntled comments to the art world.

“I work with garbage. Why? Because there is so much of it. When you think about it, it’s absurd that we are we making anything that just gets thrown away. There is no “away”. Trash, waste, garbage - whatever you call it, before was a nuisance. Now it’s a crisis.
-Ann Wizer

In Jakarta in 2002, as an art “intervention” she left her studio practice to work directly with trash pickers to focus attention and find simple solutions for improving the lives of countless unseen people; the trash pickers who live with our ever-growing mountains of waste. This initiative became XSProject Foundation in 2004 which, ‘uses design and education to protect the environment and reduce poverty”. (www.xsprojectgroup.com) The programs revolve around finding creative ways to utilize waste to create new livelihood opportunities for those living in poverty.

The exhibit “INVISIBLE” features another social interaction, an off-shoot of her XSProject. This time the social interaction is with Filipino women; mothers and grandmothers. These older unemployed women have many dependants (children and aging parents too), relying on their care and attention. These women have low incomes at best and, being tied to dependants, have no real opportunities for employment. These “invisible” ones, meaning unseen but in need of income all the same, are her focus now. The materials Wizer is using in this project are also “invisible”- unmeasured, unnoticed factory waste that goes straight from manufacturers to dump sites, rivers or scrap dealers, and, the ever present plastic bag. Like XSProject, she hopes that this interaction can grow into a sustainable income generating activity by using the simple traditional skill of crocheting to utilize waste to make green products for local and overseas markets. People interested in partnering on this project can contact her.

Gallery A displays the outcomes of a series of workshops done with Filipino women: the Invisible Institute. The I.I. is another attempt of Wizer to build something sustainable for the poor, this time for Filipino mothers and grandmothers. Using the skill of crocheting to use up an endless supply of plastic bags and invisible factory waste, the creativity, the artist in each of them, will surface. The documentation is by five different photographers, living in Manila.

Gallery B of Galleria Duemila is Wizer’s Executive Lounge, showcasing two oddly shaped “executive chairs” that are stuffed with cleaned, shredded packaging waste and corresponding photographic landscape pieces. The chairs are made especially for those CEOs of transnational companies and government officials who just aren’t addressing environmental problems. This furniture was created with the trash picker women in Jakarta who asked Wizer to create a special income generating project that they could perform during the day while at home with the many babies and kids. These women pick trash at night, partly to remain unseen. Again, irony comes into play. The very companies whose trash she has used in the furniture and the XSProject products, are those companies she approached to support XSProject and was again and again denied. Since then, Wizer has seen many of her concepts and product ideas offered as corporate giveaways from those companies. Companies seem to see Wizer’s XSProject concepts only as promotional devices to increase their sales.

Wizer’s photographs of sick landfills are distorted visually. These distortions are “necessary truths” she says, “to demonstrate how man, to the same degree has twisted nature with our destructive, selfish tinkering.”