FREDERICK REBER'S ARTIST STATEMENT

 

 

I am a North Carolina artist, trained as an Industrial Designer. I have walked away from that career... after 25 years, I'm too disillusioned with the corporate world, its disregard for employees, and the planned obsolescence of product design, so here I am...at 50 years of age, a "beginning artist". Unlike most beginning artists, I have 50 years of experience behind me. I draw upon personal experiences that I have lived.

 

My art questions our social values in unique and unexplored ways by recycling trash into art pieces. My art is conglomerate of mixed media: ink, marker, pencil, acrylics and (of course) trash. I use chopped- up junk mail squares, discarded food can labels, cigarette butts, and even dirty money. I juxtapose images onto my trash canvases, exploring visual metaphors to bring awareness of our shared, universal treasure, our Earth.

 

Subjects vary from symbolic imagery to word plays but all are created onto trash. I am actually more intrigued with the process of gathering the trash and the different textures of the trash than the actual images that I put on top of the trash.

It was a very sobering process to walk along roadsides and gather all of the cigarette butts used in "America The Beautiful" and then take them home and slice them open so they could be used in a more 2-dimensional fashion.When I think about all of the people that threw their cigarette butts onto the roadside I get pretty disgusted.

 

"America The Beautiful" is a very disturbing piece because of the whole process.

 

 

REBER'S ART

 

© 2012 GALLERY 444, SAN FRANCISCO