La Poubelle Agreee

This collection is a visual meditation on the objects and materials that pass through the lives of a family of four over 300 days from September 2009 to July 2010. As a mock anthropological study, each artifact (>3g in weight) was photographed and tagged with its respective date, material, weight, user, function and color and uploaded daily to an online feed.

Users were able to ‘sort’ through a family’s trash and via this act expose the trash can, like the project itself, as a portal from private to public property. This collection, a sampling of the 1,144 items documented, is unbound and likewise sortable.

The notion of documenting trash is as absurd as the notion of trash itself. Archiving our own absurdity was only one of the intentions. One might consider how these objects (to flip Baudrillard) hold sway over our mental realm, how our own subjectivity is governed by the things we consume on a daily basis.

Is it art? Is it design?

This project is very much about inhabiting the space between art and design.

Certainly, the visual language of image and type is graphic. Even the methodology — one of intentionality and audience — is design-oriented. The text that surrounds the piece frames and contextualizes. All these things make this a design piece, rather than art. And I like to think it is perhaps just that. However, the language has been co-opted to offer homage to the very things design has made manifest, and then discarded. Design language as a weapon turned in upon itself(?)

And what about art?  Art informs, tweaks, perverses design. And perhaps vice-versa. It offers an abstruse point of entry, one based on chance and expression. There is no rational that explains why color was used as the primary lens for this project. The video, ‘Color by Day’ that accompanies ‘La Poubelle,’ although it pretends to be about data, can not be ‘read’ as such. The transitions are chance encounters; colors dissolve one into the next without clarity. We stand mesmerized by the flickering light as one might at the overwhelming visual stimulus found in Walmart. The piece is a qualitative, spiritual response, more than a quantitative one.

Walking the thin line between can be an uncomfortable place. But I’d argue fruitful, if one is interested in a research-based practice that attempts to explore emerging issues in a poetic way to instigate a sense of wonder and seeing anew.

An archive from the Squanderless project. Holds 150 prints of the 1,144 items documented. 10” x 10” x 3”

Installation view. Fall 2012

Design Advocacy Studio

Click the above image to see the wiki with additional images, syllabus and handouts from a Pratt ‘Design Advocacy’ Summer 2011 Studio I led. Read more about the outcomes from the class in this recent article. This is an engagement of Public Project, a Pratt Institute Graduate Communications Design initiative.

Zero Waste Garden Tour is an annual event held on the 2nd Saturday of June in Beacon, NY. The tour encourages neighborly knowledge sharing to motivate residents in their organic gardening efforts. A composting workshop led by the Beacon Green Teens occurs on the same day at the Seed to Fruit garden on East Main Street.

This year participants traveled as a group along the tour route on bikes. The garden tour was endorsed as an official annual Beacon city event and a resolution in support of the event was passed.

Conducted by the Conservation Advisory Committee of Beacon, NY. Initiated by Jean Brennan. For more information, see the FB Page.

Dwell, Climb, Fly is a public art workshop for children ages 5 - 10 held during 3 subsequent weekend in May 2011 at Open Space gallery in Beacon, NY. Open and free to the public, children that attend are working collaboratively to build an installation based on the following themes: early dwellings, human and animal; climbing structures, and things that take flight. Materials were collected at local resource recovery centers and the community at large. The event culminated in an opening on Beacon’s ‘Second Saturday’ on May 14th, 2011 with an installation of the work produced and a stop motion video projection documenting the 3 weekends of making. Conducted by Valerie Foster Adam, Kalene Rivers and Jean Brennan.

See more about this event.

Transformation Design MFA Studio

Natalie Sims, Pratt MFA Candidate, flies ‘Million A Minute’ kite made from sewn plastic bags in public park in NYC. This project was realized as part of the MFA Studio, Transformation Design. View the wiki with more images, syllabus and handouts from this class.

La Poubelle Agréée

The Center For Digital Arts Gallery

October, 2011

La Poubelle Agréée is the colloquial name for the trash can derived from Monsieur Poubelle, Prefect of the Seine, who ordered in 1884 the use of refuse containers in the polluted streets of Paris. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s essay of the same name, the exhibit explores our relationship with the conventional waste bin and the objects that move through it.

Artist Jean Brennan creates a family portrait using the data of domestic waste—a live feed that ran for 10 months online. As a mock anthropological study, each artifact was photographed and tagged with its respective date, material, weight, user, function and color. Users are able to ‘sort’ through a family’s trash and via this act expose the trash can, like the site itself, as a portal from private to public property.

La Poubelle Agréée is an ode to the object—offering a trace of its purpose and demise in our lives and the implied narrative. Presenting two walls covered floor to ceiling with images sampling the 1,080 artifacts documented during the project’s lifespan, the exhibit interrogates the emotional residue of discarded possessions. Image walls are accompanied by the digital archive, a video projection, and lasercut drawings.

1. maquette shows image walls and form poster to be completed by attendees and mounted during exhibit eventually covering one wall of stenciled type with Calvino’s quote:

“…through this daily gesture I confirm the need to separate myself from a part of what was once mine, the slough or chrysalis or squeezed lemon of living, so that its substance might remain, so that tomorrow I can identify completely (without residues) with what I am and have. Only by throwing something away can I be sure that something of myself has not yet been thrown away and perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future.”

2. image wall: 50 9” x 9” images hung in a grid display a small sampling of the proposed image walls. (There are 1060 images created by the project.)

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As an adjunct associate professor in the graduate Communications Design department at Pratt Institute, I have taught and developed curriculum around design for social impact—co-teaching two courses entitled ‘Transformation Design’ and ‘Design Advocacy’. View the catalog with work created by students from the ‘Design Advocacy’ class and exhibited at the 63rd Annual United Nations DPI/NGO Conference in Melbourne, Australia.

Click above image to view my profile on the Pratt website.

A series of prints that explore common materials in domestic waste: tin foil, plastic wrap, foam packaging and newsprint/paper. As man made materials populate our world in the form of trash, these materials become our landscape both figuratively and literally. The prints transform these everyday objects into topographic maps, exploring volume, shape and materiality and the similarities between these and natural forms, breaking down the construct between the natural and the man made as one becomes the other.

1. plastic/land: digital print on paper
2. foil/ice: digital print on paper
3. plastic/cloud: digital print on paper
4. topography series, various: screenprints, guache and ink on paper (wall) and wood (table)

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This series of drawings uses mark making to visually denote the essence and individual instrumentation of sound. Placement, length and color notes pitch, duration and instrumentation, respectively.

Shown here drawings from two soundtracks off of David Rothenberg and Marilyn Crispell’s CD “One Dark Night I Left My Silent House.” 

1. detail: Sound II: colored pencil and graphite

2. detail: Sound IV: colored pencil and graphite

3. multiple: colored pencil and graphite

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A series of drawings entitled ‘Future Fossils’ reimagines choice pieces of family garbage as future archaeological records. Australian archaeologist Rowland Fletcher calls the largest monuments that any society builds for itself MVSes—Monstrous Visual Symbols. Fletcher has observed that as a society’s motivating ideals change, so do its MVSes—temples and cathedrals become bridges and skyscrapers. Landfills, such as Fresh Kills, are a potent reminder that the largest MVSes in American society today are its garbage repositories.

spiral binder fragments: clay print, laser cut paper

Flip book wedding invite featuring a juicy & wind-struck kiss by the groom & bride to be. The letters ‘L’ and ‘P’ on the cover are highlighted for couple’s initials. Matching RSVP postcard features sepia-tone shot of the Pt. Reyes wedding location.

To see more commercial design work, see jeanbrennan.com

In 2003, I partnered with the Center For Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems to secure grants and fund my travels to visit, interview and document a diverse group of CASFS alumni. View several spreads from the CASFS Alumni Booklet online.