Rebirthing The Unwanted

Rebirthing The Unwanted group exhibition is a call to "buy less, buy better" while avoiding the often moralistic discourse around material culture and consumption. By exploring the relationship between people and their possessions in relation to others, the exhibition seeks to help us see why certain objects are important to us, without dismissing the impact of waste on our environment. 

“They are the medium through which people construct their self-hood and biography, and their relationships to others and wider social worlds as people and things are mutually constituted.” Woodward, Sophie. (2015). The Hidden Lives of Domestic Things: Accumulations in Cupboards, Lofts and Shelves. 

By taking a more comforting approach to the problem of overconsumption, the group exhibition hopes to take some of the guilt away from the individual and allow them to feel more in control. To re-humanize the processes of storing, archiving and protecting certain things, to reassure a society that it has the power to do good. 

Our tastes, our trash, our objects hidden in a drawer and those displayed on a shelf are all representative of who we are. Therefore, the speech shifts from asking people to stop being materialistic to asking them to rethink how they can still be themselves while taking care of our planet. Recognizing that how people see themselves and the world is part of the conversation around waste, not an individualistic trait to hate. The group exhibition argues that expecting individuals to give up accumulating objects without seeing the reasons behind these desires is a major flaw in conversations about sustainability. 

Rebirthing The Unwanted 21 emerging and mid-career NYC-based artists interpret for us what it's like to feel like trash, to use the trash, and to create waste, inviting visitors to delve deeply into each work and use it as an opportunity to rethink the way we judge and value people, objects, and places as "trash," "junk," or "dirty”.