This Art Exhibit Is Made Of Brooklyn's Trash

CHELSEA, NY — An art exhibit currently on display in a Chelsea gallery is made with some unusual materials: trash collected from Dead Horse Bay in the Rockaways.

The artist Misha Kahn created an immersive art installation by collecting pieces of metal, glass, plastic and other scraps from the Rockaways beach, and used various tactics to turn the trash into art. Kahn' exhibit, called "Midden Heap" is currently on display at the Friedman Benda gallery, 515 W. 26th St.

"For this show, I...collected crap from the sea that caught my attention: clusters of bags had been so entangled with each other that they now looked like kelp, a toilet seat became a textured shell, shards of broken bottles became so wobbly and deformed they looked like translucent calamari," Kahn said in a statement.

Dead Horse Bay, which was once a landfill, is strewn with trash, broken glass bottles and other junk across its shoreline. Kahn used melding, glassblowing and other techniques to create the the exhibit.

"Each piece is part of a landscape I imagine as the earth gets swallowed by the sea," he explained in the statement. "No single object has any specific meaning. It’s all part of a feeling."

Dead Horse Bay takes its name from one its original uses as a dumping ground for dead horses. Horses that were chopped up and processed on the nearby Barren Island before being dumped on Dead Horse Bay, according to the Times. The land was later used as a landfill before its current iteration as a trash-strewn beach.

You can learn more about the exhibit here.

Image credit: Courtesy of the Friedman Benda gallery