Turning recyclables into art

Sponges. Cardboard. Wooden buckles. Utopia? In a new art show at the Huntington Beach Art Center, three artists were each given a room to create a large-scale, site-specific installation depicting their own version of utopia, curator Darlene DeAngelo said.

All three chose to use recycled materials, from Lucrecia Troncoso’s kitchen sponge flora to P. Williams’ cardboard city on the brink of destruction to Kiel Johnson’s paper survival vest.

Johnson, the recent recipient of a Pollack-Krasner Grant, spent five years living near the Port of Los Angeles, where his friends joked that he needed to be prepared for a dirty bomb attack.

So he dreamed up a design for a survival vest, with numerous pockets and pouches, that would hold all he would need.

“Once you put it on, you can live for a year,” Johnson said.

After sketching it out a few times, Johnson made a “prototype” out of paper and wooden buckles, designed to fit him and based on an actual SWAT jacket.

“I just like to build the objects in my imagination,” Johnson said.

He hung the vest from a hook resembling a crane commonly found at the port.

It now hangs in his exhibition, along with his large-scale, labyrinthine city drawings.

One, mounted on a massive piece of wood, depicts port life, complete with traffic and warehouses.

A more recent creation was influenced by Johnson’s recent move to the Alhambra area, and includes stilted homes on hillsides.

The latter was “tattooed” to the wall of the gallery over a four-day period and will be painted over once the show ends.

“It’s kind of fun to know that it’s only going to last for a little while,” Johnson said.

P. Williams, a graphic design and animation teacher at an arts magnet school, also created a rather transitory installation.

He spent the past week assembling and arranging hundreds of components of a miniature city, which he positioned throughout his share of the gallery.

“It’s been a couple days since I’ve slept really well,” Williams said.

The project has ballooned to become much larger than his original plan, with freeways, cars, buildings and jet planes.

“I’ll be really glad to get this done,” he said. “I can’t emphasize that enough.”

He warned of a calamitous fate for his nascent city.

The scale model will be used in a performance art piece at 8 p.m. during the opening reception; video of the event will then be projected on the walls for the remainder of the exhibition.

The show is about the “ridiculousness of humanity,” Williams said.

“The city itself is sort of an organism.”

His fascination with organisms is shared by Troncoso, an Argentine-born artist from Berkeley, who has a mutual love of biology and art.

As she had never been in the gallery until this week, when she arrived to install her art, she designed her exhibition with only a floor plan and site photos.

On one wall, she projects part of a film she made of a Norwegian forest; she became interested in film during a residency program in Argentina.

The primary element of Troncoso’s show features a tree growing out of a stark white wall, made of bright green kitchen sponges that were sliced and sculpted into vines, branches and leaves.

Troncoso and her friends raided Bay Area stores to find all the sponges she would need.

The holey sponge pieces create a lissome effect on the wall, especially when light plays through them, adding shadowy elements.

She calls the piece “Tree of Life (Antimicrobial).”

WHAT: “Ground Us”

WHEN: Noon to 6 p.m. Wednesday to Saturday; noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Runs through Aug. 31; opening reception 7 to 9 p.m. Friday

WHERE: Huntington Beach Art Center, 538 Main St.

COST: Free admission

INFORMATION: (714) 374-1650 or surfcity-hb.org

CANDICE BAKER may be reached at (949) 494-5480 or at candice.baker@latimes.com.