David Hamlow has been collecting his own trash for almost 40 years, taking up space in his attic, basement and storage locker.
He uses the trash — typically clear plastics, paper cardboard and thicker cardboard — to create art installations.
Hamlow said he considers these pieces self portraits because most of it is his personal trash.
“Pretty much everything I make, at least in its base core form, is made out of products and product waste from things I consume myself,” Hamlow said during the event. “It's always a self portrait because, me as a consumer, it's the kind of things I buy.”
Hamlow created an art installation for Elon’s Arts West Gallery 406, using the curved wall and high ceilings to his advantage. David Hamlow hosted an artist talk and opening reception Sept. 9 surrounded by the pieces of the gallery.
“For a painter, you have a canvas. For a drawer, you have paper. For the installation artists, the entire space is a canvas,” Hamlow said.
Hamlow said he was inspired to use trash as his medium so he could show just how much one person can produce.
“If I as one person produce this much, then probably you as one person also produce the same amount,” Hamlow told Elon News Network. “And so just that awareness of how much a single human being can produce in waste, and then also that there could be a creative way to change things.”
The theme of Hamlow’s exhibition was North Carolina utopias, bringing inspiration from Soul City, a business community founded by African Americans but open to everyone; Bold Moon Farm, a women’s collective to escape what they saw as a patriarchal world; and The Maroons, a community of self-emancipated slaves. Though these utopias do not exist in their original forms anymore, Hamlow said he wanted to explore the idea of shared-ideological communities.
“These three places that I looked at, you could get to them in an hour, maybe a little bit more. They're not that far away from here,” Hamlow said during the event. “There's little left of those communities, and a lot of what's interested me lately is what makes people want to go away from society and form their own intentional community. … People decide together to go somewhere and live a certain way, usually with a kind of shared ideology that's often decided before.”
This part of the installation is what intrigued sophomore Eden Perry the most.
“I think his inspiration for the title to be the most compelling for me, being from North Carolina,” Perry said. “I didn't know about some of these cities, and these lost communities in utopias since I was like, ‘Oh, here's something new.’ Obviously it was beyond just technique, it was story and backstory of the art that I think was very interesting.”
In each panel of the spherical art piece — called geodesic construction — students from Louisiana Tech University made different creations to put inside the plastic bubble. Throughout the week, six senior art students also created different sides of the geometric sphere. Elon students also got to create pieces to fit into bricks.
Hamlow said he wants students to understand the consumption in their own lives.
“They can either surround viewer, equal or exceed the viewer in size, and it's giving you that sense of being overwhelmed by just what a single human being can produce in ways,” Hamlow said.
The exhibit will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday until Sept. 27.