Recycling Urgencies: A collection of woven goods crafted from international trash.

Opening Saturday Nov.7th 6-9 pmNov. 7th-- Nov.30th Tribes Gallery 285 E. 3rd St. #2 New York, NY 10009

Peruvian-American artist Aymar Ccopacatty will display his woven treasures for one week only in a solo exhibition. Ccopacatty brings handspun, woven and painted works inspired by the Andean highlands of his fathers’ Aymara people. Ccopacatty’s work creates awareness while sharing some of the color and beauty of these lands through a series of paintings and sculpture featuring Peruvian and American Trash woven together in the traditional Aymara style.

Ccopacatty has been living with his family in Peru since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Sculpture in 2004. He went “home” with the intention to help his people navigate globalization. Through his travels and experiences he has accumulated a wealth of materials and ideas. Ccopacatty has returned to the USA to display these objects of environmental and cultural significance as a means of education.

Much of the trash comes from Lake Titicaka, an ancient and ecologically sensitive environment, 12,000 feet above sea level. “It’s a really pristine geography,” says Ccopocatty, “the people traditionally are used to trash as natural byproducts of living, like banana and potato peels. They just throw it. Now there is all this plastic and that’s the problem.” Ccopacatty collects this trash wherever he goes. He cuts up the fibers and then spins it into threads on a drop spindle. After transforming the raw material, he crafts it into a variety of art and wearable objects.

The exhibition will run for three weeks. For more information please contact Tribes at info@tribes.org or call 212 674 3778.

http://www.aymart.org http://www.tribes.org

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KZ_jHkIbZc

The following links are for blogs that wrote about the artworks of Aymar. http://elwaproductions.blogspot.com/2009/11/aymar-ccopacatty-opening.html http://spackleshot.blogspot.com/2009/11/someone-fetch-me-my-teeth.html