If you walk down Locust Street in Midtown and peer in the window of the old Moon Building you’ll see a colorful display of art pieces.
Look closer, though, and you’ll realize they’re all trash.
The sculptures were made by Adrienne Outlaw, who addresses plastic pollution through her new exhibit Consumed.
“I’m literally airing my family’s garbage to encourage dialogue about it,” Outlaw says in a statement. “It stuns me how much we use.”
It took Outlaw two years to collect all the building blocks for her pieces, including shampoo bottles, detergent bottles, produce containers, milk cartons, water bottles, bottle caps and more. She then spent three more years cutting and recombining her family’s plastic waste into sculpture.
Outlaw cut plastic milk jugs in half and placed them in a way that allows individuals to peer into the container to reveal agriculture workers or a mirror to show that pollution and climate change not only hurts ourselves but others as well. She also built a sculpture out of mattress springs and her husband’s vitamin water bottles and a colorful wall sculpture of lids from a variety of bottles.
Though Outlaw has long addressed issues of global consumerism, her inspiration for this project started after a summer trip to Singapore in 2019.
“I started working with some artists there and saw the impact of literally our trash on their beaches, and it was piling up — you'd see Coca-Cola wrappers and all this stuff,” she says. “There was a really interesting artist and he did this piece where they collected debris from the beach, laid it out on a dinner table and then you'd be invited to this ‘dinner party’ where you'd pick out microplastics from the sand.”
When she got back to St. Louis, Outlaw made it her mission to address the city’s importance in solving plastic pollution due to its close proximity to the Mississippi River. “We are so close to the Mississippi, it kind of makes us even more responsible to clean up our trash,” she says. “Once it gets in, that river is like taking the highway out of here.”
Outlaw makes her art in the space where she’ll now be showing it off. She calls her showroom AOS (3115 Locust Street) and it will be open from 12:30 to 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 20 — Earth Day — to showcase Consumed. The exhibit will also include family-friendly activities for easily reducing, recycling and repurposing.
“When people see what I've done hopefully they get inspired whether you're going to turn into an artist or not, or realize that you don't have to continue buying new things to make whatever it is you want to make,” Outlaw says. “I love working with plastic. It's colorful, it connects with viewers and it makes a powerful statement about the environment.”
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