Runoff, 2024–2025

View of entry to exhibit with Christy Rupp Runoff on white wall

Exhibition images from “Runoff” at University of Buffalo Anderson Gallery, Martha Jackson Place, Buffalo, NY, September 28, 2024–March 9, 2025

Essay: Space of Waste

At the heart of all waste is a curious paradox: that which we get rid of is also our legacy. No matter how completely we think we have thrown something away, it maintains an eternal link to our bodies, our lives, our consumption, and our relationships. Our detritus becomes the archaeology of the future.

Our garbage creates, changes, or destroys the habitats of other beings – habitats that are as intimately connected to our own as our breath is to our bodies. Rats run through our trash bags, nibbling our leftovers, forging an interspecies urban architecture around our drains, our dumpsters, and our service tunnels. Seagulls pick over our landfill sites and hermit crabs make their homes in barnacle-encrusted tin cans on the ocean floor. Chemical spills poison our waterways, while agricultural run-off makes them bloom with bright swathes of algae, a proliferation of green life while fish and frogs gasp for oxygen. Earthworms swallow microplastics and bacteria become resistant to surplus bleach and antibiotics.

We are not “supposed” to see all this. Every day, our waste is gently snatched away from us by convoys of lorries, municipal street cleaners, storm drains, and chutes. This happens before we can see what we’ve done, before we can comprehend the magnitude of the rubbish we are producing as a society. Out of sight, out of mind, we are told. And why? Because there is money in garbage. Sack-loads of it. We are all living within the garbage-industrial complex.

Over the course of her long career, Christy Rupp has engaged with these questions of waste, visibility, and habitat. Working primarily with discarded single-use plastics, her sculptures tell a story of the vibrancy of all life, the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman ecosystems, and the power exerted on our shared world by waste. Informed by the emerging field of discard studies, Rupp explores the maintenance of power by dominant systems through which places, people, materials, and beings, are devalued and discarded.

Rupp is particularly drawn to the context of these questions in her home city of Buffalo, an area named after an animal that once defined many North American landscapes. The story of the animal and its demise reveals the power of waste – and particularly to the ways in which things are wasted not because they are valueless, but because they are valuable.

The skeletal forms of some of Rupp’s sculptures offer a subtle dialogue with the famous 1892 photograph of a mountain of buffalo skulls surmounted by a white colonizer, whose human frame is diminished by the sheer scale of slaughter represented by the cascading skulls. As the largest land mammals in the Americas, buffalo are keystone species in their native ecosystems, and were part of a fundamental reciprocal relationship with Indigenous peoples. The colonizers’ attempt to eradicate them was also an attempt to eradicate Indigenous peoples, who relied on their meat, hide, and role in grazing the lands under their stewardship. By devaluing the buffalo and designating them as disposable, colonizers attempted to do the same for Indigenous peoples, denying the value of their human existence. Rupp’s practice makes visible the insidious violence of waste – while also maintaining a joyful appreciation of human and nonhuman resilience in the face of devaluation.

Under this way of looking at things, both colonialism and capitalism become systems of creating waste, in ways that are increasingly closely tied to the oil industry. In this exhibition, Rupp actively alludes to the destructive power of oil pipelines, as well as working with petroleum-based products such as various plastics.

Several pieces are beautifully crafted from defunct credit cards, where their overlaid shards resemble protective scales, an exoskeleton of hollow promises. Excess is encapsulated in the credit card, a form of plastic money that encourages a disconnection from reality in the same way that our garbage systems do. We borrow money to buy consumer goods, and when we do, we are rewarded with free flights; capital and oil are such companionable bedfellows.

In our relationship to the more-than-human world, Rupp suggests, we are borrowing against the future. We are blindly spending resources without recognizing their essential role as habitat, driving a spectrum of species towards extinction – perhaps including ourselves. We are buying things cheap, but in the future our debt will be crippling; while money is intangible and fluid, extinction is finite.
What will we choose to save, and who decides? Which lives will we label valueless and discard? And how will the legacy of our waste be read by future generations?

–Anna Souter