The artistic feature on our kitchen calendar this month is a collage of photos of garbage called Self Portrait as revealed by trash by Tim Gaudreau. I love this one! The artist took photos of every item he discarded for a year. Of the 5,000 photos in all, he selected a few, most representative of himself and formed a collage he dubbed his self portrait. I thought how true?! I had never really considered what story my trash may tell about me. Then, I thought, wait a second, this man had 5,000 images, and he chose only these 25 or so. That got my attention. I wondered what was so special about these images that he would choose them for a collage, to the neglect of others. So, I started looking for stories, themes, or whatever the items might have in common. I mean he did after all select these items specifically from 5000 for this piece, so there must be some reason. I took this self portrait at its word, that it is truly representative of the man… or at least representative of the way this man wants others to see him. I learned the guy eats a lot of convenience and junk food, had some nasty looking shoes to throw out, and that there must have been some major relationship issue, since it appears that he threw away a wedding ring?! Then, I noticed he had three condom wrappers on there, which made me wonder, why three? I mean, isn’t one enough to portray that he’s a responsibly sexual being? He sacrificed two other images in this piece, for the sake of putting three on there… I can’t help but wonder why. Maybe he wanted us to know the amount of time he spent having protected sex as compared to the amount of time he ate ice cream that year? I dunno, but this stuff intrigues me. And, why in that order? They do seem to be strategically placed in the collage. Then I noticed three Snapple bottles, to which I almost assumed there was nothing to my curiosity… he probably just selected these somewhat randomly. Nah, this is his ‘self portrait’ I rationalized, he must have selected these. But then, I suspected placing three of these bottles was compensatory, like perhaps there is an agenda in one of the items, but to protect the mystery, he can’t reveal the intentionality by overstating it alone …  but maybe I’m just over-thinking it now.

I wonder what my own self portrait in trash would look like. It’s funny, I thought about that every time I went to the trashcan this week. I’m sure the fascination will go away soon, but it’s fun to think about. And yeah, I did get the eco statement in the piece, but the content of it was far more interesting to me.

The piece on our calendar is the first image on this page, if you’d like to view it too.