“Material Recovery” combines printmaking with assemblage, collage and sculpture to illustrate the iconography of the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, along with images suggesting the waste left there by the shipping industry. The exhibition of 81 pieces by 31 artists—using recycled materials—eclipses the “art for art’s sake” concept; yet, important aesthetic aspects are imbued throughout. The show was created by Lynk Collective, a group of SoCal artists who collaborate on projects and installations, employing printmaking techniques.

The collagraph, relief, monoprint, drypoint and etching prints, in figurative to abstract styles, depict the nearby industrial forms, along with natural and biomorphic images. Curated by Christina Yasmin Fesmire and Jared Millar, the pieces are printed onto reclaimed cardboard, paper, leftover chipboard, plastics, old compact discs, thrift store fabric and wood. The printed pieces, along with complementary sculptures, all created in 2023, present both the benefits and spoils of our industrial society.

The show’s centerpiece is the installation, Container, by Alexandra Chiara, Christina Yasmin Fesmire, Nguyen Ly, Diane McLeod, Jared Millar, William Myers, Olga Ryabtsova Paula Voss and Zana Zupur. The mosaic-style Container is composed of 32 collaged and printed panels on found paper, depicting the vistas, viewed from the nearby Gerald Desmond and Vincent Thomas Bridges, spanning the passageway from Long Beach to San Pedro. At 96 by 192 inches, the piece mirrors the size and shape of the metal shipping containers in the harbor, as seen from those bridges. While visually referencing cranes, bridges, machinery, graffiti, local fauna and flora, the work evokes the maritime world of longshoremen.

The Discard Project involves exchanged prints that original artists considered to be unfinished or unsuccessful. Their successors transformed the donated prints into stunningly creative work. Under the Big Top by Tracy Loreque Skinner and Paula Voss features a semi-abstract, jubilant circus performer on a prancing horse. Primavera by Alexandra Chiara, Elisabeth Beck and Bill Jaros, illustrating a blue-faced woman in profile with flowers bedecking her head and adorning her bodice, suggests the ambiance of spring.

Diane McLeod, Yeansoo Aum, Elisabeth Beck, Andra Broekelschen, Alexandra Chiara, Christina Yasmin Fesmire, Karen Fiorito, Bill Jaros, Nguyen Ly, Laura Shapiro, Tracy Loreque Skinner, Paula Voss, Zana Zupur, Discard Project, 2023.

Also in the show is Laura Shapiro’s Precarious Kinship, an aesthetically attractive assemblage work, consisting of numerous unraveled paper bag handles. These opened handles become the shapes of feathers, corn husks or palm fronds, and are printed in a variety of colors. The resulting piece, with the handles carefully stitched together with embroidery thread, is both fragile and evocative of indigenous art.

This exhibition also includes wooden sculptures referencing the discarded and reclaimed wood polluting the San Pedro Harbor. Among the most majestic is Francisco Rogido’s How Often/Question and Doubt Whether That Is Really Me, a bust of a man’s head, reminiscent of primitive sculptures. Rogido explains that the piece mirrors his emotional journeys of having moved among three countries, three cultures and three concepts of life. Two drypoint, hand-printed relief prints, Head I & II, installed behind the sculpture, mirror the piece and enhance it.

“Material Recovery” expresses an ecologically conscious viewpoint by a diverse group of printmakers who live and work in SoCal. By employing discarded materials, their work conveys their artistic perspective that we all inhabit a shared earth that we must protect.