Weeds and trash, Scott Wolniak noticed after he and his wife bought their Humboldt Park home in 1998, had one thing in common: “They were very tenacious–they kept coming back.” In 2001, a year after he entered grad school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, he began collecting weeds and rubbish and photographing the overgrown rectangle of parkway between his portion of the sidewalk and the street. Later one of his professors suggested he somehow re-create the rectangle, and he began making weeds out of discarded stuff, much of it scrap paper. Eight of the sculptures are now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, along with two videos. Covered with advertisements, Wolniak’s brightly colored plants are almost pretty but also a bit scary, like mutants from a future in which debris has replaced nature. The horror-movie idea is reinforced by one of the videos, Growth Spurt, which shows a trash plant springing out of the soil.
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Scott Wolniak
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Joeff Davis.
