UMass art graduate students Avery Forbes & Chenda Cope were inspired to transform the student gallery into a workshop and repair broken objects to celebrate re-use. They believe consumerism may be taking the world to a very desperate place. 

 “We began by asking ourselves where our current culture of unconscious consumerism could lead. Initially, we were experimenting with creating new systems of communication using only repurposed materials, but this post-apocalyptic concept eventually began to feel too bleak” said Forbes.  Instead, the two artists decided to focus on creating a positive space. Starting with a collection of broken household objects collected from the community, the artists will work in the gallery/workshop space to repair everything that they can.

The two graduate students were curious about the channels for re-use at UMass. Forbes & Cope began their installation at the UMass Waste Recovery and Transfer facility. They filled their UHaul with salvaged wood, broken furniture, and some used items that looked barely worn.  Over the weekend they broke apart pallets, removed nails, refinished wooden panels, and constructed sawhorses for table legs and brackets for shelving out of the salvaged materials. These items, combined with tools from the artists’ personal collections — which also incidentally included a large amount of salvaged materials– were used to turn the white gallery space into an old style workshop. The room is complete with a golden trophy atop a rustic dark wood desk, A-frame tables and plywood shelves around the walls with labeled boxes piled with tools, parts, and extra materials. Barely recognizable, a repairman who had been working on turning the classroom space into gallery last semester wandered into the newly built workshop and said “I thought this was a gallery.”

 The artists are inviting people to bring in torn fabric, paper, and soft plastic items such as umbrellas, books, clothes, and broken household appliances such as lights and fans, as well as “aesthetically challenged objects” that owners may want a fresh spin on. The objects Forbes and Cope have already collected come from friends, from objects left behind in classrooms over summer break, and from other students. They have also made use of another system of re-use on the UMass campus– the New2U program. The New2U, started in 2013, is a program run by the Sustainability office that collects used items at the end of the semester from students moving out of the dorms. Over the summer a group of paid interns test, clean and price the donated items and they are then sold at a tag sale in the Fall. All of the funds raised go to projects funded by the Sustainability, Innovation & Engagement Fund. According to the programs webpage, New2U has been able to divert over 80,000 pounds of items from being sent to landfills. A small number of items that were tested and deemed broken or unsellable were collected for this exhibition. Forbes hopes that Gather furthers the culture of re-use and sharing on campus, since once the exhibition is over the repaired items will be available for free to members of the UMass community. “We want this exhibition to extend beyond the gallery. We want people to take these healed objects home and be reminded that repair is possible,” Forbes said. 

 There are some items that  will not be able to fix. More complicated electronics items and items involving computer chips are out of their wheelhouses. The new pop-up All-Campus Maker-space in the Agricultural Engineering Building is the place for advanced electronic repairs. Broken bikes can be brought to the UMass Bike Co-Op,  a student-run bike repair shop downstairs from the gallery on the first floor of Bartlett.  Simple electronics like water boilers, fans, coffee grinders and basic electronic toys can be dropped off during gallery hours Monday through Friday from 11 to 3pm through the 9th of October in the elevator accessible Bart Gallery on the third floor of Bartlett Hall in room 310. 

The showing artists will be altering and fixing the items in the workshop space from 12-2pm on Mondays through Thursdays. Come by during those “clinic hours” to learn about the repair process or just to sip on some tea and munch on some snacks. All repaired items will go on display in the gallery next door until the closing on Wednesday, October 9 from 5-7 PM. After the closing, free items will be up for grabs, and donated items can be reclaimed. 

Now’s the time to reach into the darkest depths of your closet for all of the thing you told yourself you would fix at some point when you were not a busy person, and let two inspired, keen graduate students do it for you- for arts sake.