Meet the dumpster-diving artist who turns garbage into art

Ingleby Gallery’s stand at Frieze New York. To meet Harman last week, I took the 5 train to the end of the line and then walked 25 minutes into Westchester, just north of the Bronx. I passed innumerable auto shops, a massive street-salt pile and Saint Paul’s Church, a national historic site that was used as a British Army hospital during the Revolutionary War. (The church tower’s bell, which still hangs there today, was cast in the same foundry as Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell and was buried by the parishioners to stop the British from melting it down for ammunition.)I eventually found Harman on a side street, standing next to the skip, assessing the cubic sculpture coming together inside. Built from the detritus found in the dumpster—bits of plywood, surprisingly lovely slabs of marble and so much cardboard—the unfinished piece looked as if it would fit next to any Arte Povera work or example of anarchitecture by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. The rough diagonal line on the front of the work emerged as Harman began to assemble it and discovered that his spirit level was “useless” against the competing slants of the potholed street and the bent steel sides of the dumpster. [embedded content]Kevin Harman working on Skip 16 (2018) in Mt Vernon, New YorkFilm by Christopher L. CookHarman had been labouring in the lugger, without assistants, for 18-hour stretches for two days, staying until at least midnight and relying on a headlamp to see into the container’s tight, dark corners, since the street light above was broken. After clearing out organic materials (decomposing fruit, a bag of coleslaw, half a chicken squashed in tin foil) and scrubbing the dumpster’s inside walls to get rid of any “dribblage contamination” and smelly residues, he set to work creating order out of chaos. Although h... (Art Newspaper)