Pieces of What – art installation

Joined exhibition with Carolina Sánchez de Bustamante at the Kelowna Art Gallery in Kelowna BC Canada, from May 2015 – May 2016.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            Even if gardens are not your cup of tea, when you come to visit the current artist’s garden project at the Kelowna Art Gallery, you will doubtless agree on who would love this year’s commission – good old Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street. This garden is urban, grungy, and full of trash!
Vernon-based mother-and-son team Carolina Sanchez de Bustamante and Maxwell Sterry wanted to focus on the issue of the environment for their year-long garden installation, and to subtly draw our attention to the volume of materials that are dumped daily into the landfill. Animating the Gallery’s open-air Rotary Courtyard space are three tall columns, delineated with strands of fishing line and strung up with brightly-colored spheres made from clean trash. These bits of junk have been painted in red, orange or yellow, and then grouped by colour. At the base of each column trash has been piled up and spray painted as well, and viewers come to notice the trash has been sorted, so that the shortest column (red) has rubber and computer trash, the middle one (orange) has metals, and the tallest one (yellow) has plastic. When the breeze moves through the space a gentle and pleasant pinging sound is produced by the trash bits knocking together.
Written by Liz Wylie – Curator at the Kelowna Art Gallery.

Maxwell Sterry, born and raised in Vernon, BC in 1996. brings a young and fresh creative mind to the gallery.
Since 2008, he has collaborated at Ashpa Naira Studio producing handmade architectural ceramics.
He studied Architecture at McGill University in Montreal, Canada – 2015-1019… a discipline where art and design should flow together. He is currently working in Montreal, Canada, and preparing to complete the Master in Architecture.