MAX LIBOIRON, "Abundance," August 15 to September 26, 2008, ODD Gallery, Dawson City

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"Abundance"

Max Liboiron, "Abundance," installation view, at ODD Gallery, Dawson City, YK.

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"Abundance"

Max Liboiron, "Abundance," installation view, at ODD Gallery, Dawson City, YK.

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"Abundance"

Max Liboiron, "Abundance," installation view, at ODD Gallery, Dawson City, YK.

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"Abundance"

Max Liboiron, "Abundance," installation view, at ODD Gallery, Dawson City, YK.

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MAX LIBOIRON, Abundance

ODD Gallery, Dawson City

August 15 to September 26, 2008

By Nicole Bauberger

What is the difference between art and garbage? InAbundance, Max Liboiron takes discoveries from Dawson City dumps and creates a modular installation depicting the town and its nuisance grounds, aiming to make trash valuable enough for viewers to take home. Liboiron avoids the pitfall of preachiness. The reports, research and dioramas she’s compiled could result in a show feeling too much like a school project, but the show’s inspiration is accessible and refreshingly lucid and fun. A seven-year-old boy spent half an hour playing with the installation the first morning it was open.

Liboiron’s genuine interest in her audience plays into the success of her show. Abundance is a “structure of participation,” with viewers invited to take pieces of the show home with them. A camera set up in the gallery tracks viewers’ response to this offer. The show is part of her Ph.D. project in visual culture and environment at New York University — online, her blog allows viewers to follow the process of creating the show and read her musings on the nature of art vs. the nature of garbage.

Consider Liboiron’s use of screw-top plastic water bottle caps to represent water, placed to depict the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers. This choice works on metaphorical, political and aesthetic levels. The design of a bottle cap is completely determined by its role in containing fluid, and its shape says “water.” At the same time their proliferation in the show call into question the wasteful use of plastic-bottled water, in a simple and beautiful way.

Liboiron modeled the show components on the tourist “kitsch” that sits on gift shop shelves during the tourism-driven Dawson summer. She recasts solid waste as a kind of “urban ore.” Each of the pieces consists of at least 80% reclaimed waste material, and sports a “made with Authentic Dawson City Raw Materials” tag on the bottom. In the Yukon, where almost every raw material is imported at considerable expense, this has particular resonance.

In fact there are few communities like Dawson where a show like this is even possible. As close as Whitehorse, scavengers now have to pay a $50 fee just to access the dump. In many southern municipalities, scavenging is simply illegal, despite the struggle to find land to fill with our castoffs.

Two weeks after the opening, many small pieces had been taken by gallery visitors, but the installation still looked like a representation of Dawson. The ravens had thinned, and there were no more dioramas with cute little garbage bags, but the water bottle caps still traced the rivers.

Four larger dioramas, called Northern Topography 1-4, also remained. They were never available to take away. Liboiron constructed these roughly 16” square pieces from oddly dissolved chunks of the old town dock. They remain, with their resin-ponds, model cars and salt snow, to challenge Yukoners to investigate, by art or science, what it is in the pristine northern river that dissolves Styrofoam.