Garbage collection, in the field of computer science, is related to the process of memory management. Peterman’s site-specific installation, occupying the library of a historic Hyde Park mansion neighboring the University of Chicago, takes a lower-tech approach to this conjoining of waste and memory. One ton of multicolored, post-consumer plastic boards pose as surrogate books, filling the library shelves and simultaneously tiling the floor. The project establishes a seamless connection between the architectural repurposing of a former waste material and the contemplation of this same material as a type of stored data. In this modest southside archive, an endlessly varied post-consumer color palette and vast reserve of petroleum-derived polymer molecules is offered into our collective memory.
2012. Supported by the artist, SHoP, and Hyde Park Kunstverein, Chicago
