Strange Beauty

Strange Beauty is a project I worked on for UNM instructor Meggan Gould’s Visualizing Ideas. The project started as a small collection and slowly grew into a large pile of bottles lying around my room. I found myself consuming more and more plastic products that I one day decided to photograph. In truth, something was unsettling about how easy it was for me to keep collecting and adding a bottle to a bottle to my growing collection. It was even more unsettling how easy it became to photograph each one in abstract images and fluttering light that later became a new form of recycling my plastic waste. As a modern American person, I have naturally become a consumer of reusable waste. I never held myself accountable for keeping track of what I was throwing away or how I was impacting the environment with the amount of plastic waste I am creating by consuming more plastic products. The piece is meant to take accountability for the impact people have on the environment and the importance of recycling in my culture the elder talk about “walk in beauty” meaning people showing respect for our original mother earth.