Unwanted works of art to be installed on Tin Can Beach

Keeley Haftner is surrounded by rejects.

The Third Space Gallery in Saint John houses the results of a recent open call — for New Brunswick artists' rejected and unwanted works — ready to be installed on Tin Can Beach,

"It's going to be a landfill, three by four feet, that exists mostly underground," the Saskatoon-born, Chicago-based artist said of her project, commissioned by Third Space.

Called Galleryfill, it is the newest piece of permanent public art in Saint John.

Unwanted artworks

A lot of the pieces came in during the gallery's open call in late May for unwanted art. Haftner brought some of the pieces with her from Chicago.

Among the buried art will be two boxes of unsold piano CDs, four large paintings, concrete sculptures, drawings and screen prints.

The pieces will be installed to proper landfill standards, incorporating stones, sand, clay and felt, so that the submitted works will eventually be buried under a layer of Kentucky bluegrass sod.

"Some engineers through the landfill here at Fundy Region Solid Waste have provided us with a complete drawing and spec sheet of how we go about making the landfill to landfill standards," Haftner said.

Once complete, all those works of art will be effectively buried and decomposing at Tin Can Beach, with a message to visitors that they're there.

According to Third Space's website, "the resultant sculpture is envisioned as a gentle mound of grass containing the unwanted artworks, with a material marker describing the artwork."

The process wil be documented by Haftner starting June 28, eventually to be presented at Third Space in conjunction with a physical publication.

Unconventional art

"I've been playing with this idea for a while, and Galleryfill is an extension of that," Haftner said.

While studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she began to work with thrown-away pieces from fellow artists.

She broke up, polished and arranged an unwanted sculpture into multiple pieces for one installation and filled a container with nearly 300 pounds of polished fragments of unwanted ceramics for another.

One of Haftner's public works in Saskatoon comprised two cellophane-wrapped bales of recyclables. It received national attention in 2014 when local people described it as "unsightly."

One resident of the neighbourhood the piece was placed in covered it with a tarp and a sign that said: "Our tax dollars are for keeping garbage OFF the streets."

Underground gallery

"It's like a museum or a gallery, the way of I think of it, that's housed within the Earth and has these unwanted or broken or damaged works inside of it," Haftner said on Information Morning Saint John when the project was first announced.

Third Space pitched the project to council in May and got approval.

Emily Saab, director at Third Space, said she expects the public will take interest in the piece.

"There really hasn't been any head-scratching," she said. "It's been really been very positive. People can connect with it, whether or not they have a contemporary art background and they're familiar with conceptual art or land art, or if they're more familiar with municipal workings of a landfill."