Empty Vessels

In this series, I recreate historically accurate product labels on discarded glass and plastic bottles I’ve collected at Dead Horse Bay Beach in Brooklyn, NY. Originally built on a landfill created in 1948 by urban planner Robert Moses, erosion now reveals popular toiletries from mid-twentieth century America—Pond’s Cold Cream, Jergen’s Lotion, Revlon Nail Polish—bottle upon bottle, strewn along the shore at low tide, most without any original branding or packaging. My artistic process includes determining the manufacturing provenance of each found object, often by its shape alone, and then reproducing the product label by painting it directly onto the glass or plastic. The result is a striking juxtaposition of an aged bottle with a pristine, hand-drawn label, emphasizing the bottle’s original value as a totemic object of nostalgic feminine desire from 1950s America. By taking something from the “trash” and turning it into art, I seek to reverse our pervasive disposal of waste.