The TrashTOTEM installation is the latest in a number of works which deal with what Tapio Makela, Finnish media critic, calls the "archeology of the contemporary." The structures are centrifuges which operate in reverse like magnets collecting and drawing in all that might be abandoned by the commodity fetishism of our modern society. The TrashTOTEM installation in the faculty exhibition in the UMBC gallery represents a culmination of various aspects of research I have undertaken into urban cultural artifacts. TrashTOTEM is informed by William Rathje's text, Rubbish; The Archaeology of Garbage: What our Garbage Tells us about Ourselves. In particular is a segment in his text about the core samples he took from Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island in New York which echo the TrashTOTEM.
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