Compacted Trash is part of Kelly Wood’s Continuous Garbage Project 1998–2003, a five-year photographic series documenting the artist’s domestic waste. Initiated during the 1998 Vancouver garbage workers’ strike, the project involved photographing non-recyclable household trash—bagged in opaque and translucent plastic—against a neutral studio backdrop. The resulting 275 images, created in both Vancouver and Toronto, were printed at life size and originally exhibited chronologically in groupings by year. Blurring performance, documentation, and minimalist strategies, the project reflects Wood’s sustained interest in waste economies and consumer culture.
Kelly Wood, Compacted Trash, 2000. C-print. SFU Art Collection. Gift of Richard J. Balfour, 2024.
Title
Compacted Trash
Artist
Kelly Wood
Year
2000
Collection
SFU Art Collection
Year Acquired
2024
Artists
Kelly Wood (b. 1962) is a photographer and artist whose research focuses on subjects related to the environmental impact of waste accumulation, waste economies and all forms of visible and invisible pollution. Wood is an associate professor in visual arts and photography at the University of Waterloo. She holds a diploma from Emily Carr University and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. She was a student of prominent photo-conceptualists Jeff Wall, Ken Lum, and Ian Wallace, and studied alongside Stan Douglas and Vicki Alexander. Wood has written about Vancouver photography for international publications such as History of Photography and Philosophy of Photography in the UK. She has been committed to the subject of waste in the environment as a visual problem for an extensive period of time; her photographs of local and other garbage forms now reside in major national and international museum collections and are included in the monograph of her photography, The Vancouver Carts (Black Dog, 2016). Wood is a member of the research organization The Synthetic Collective.