Our trash is this artist's treasure

LONG ISLAND CITY, N.Y. -- Paul Villinski is not sure why he is obsessed with salvaging discarded objects and transforming them, but that's long been his MO as an artist: He takes discarded beer cans and turns them into wall displays of colorful butterflies; he takes work gloves left in the gutter and stitches them into giant wings, the gloves' fingers fluttering like feathers; and when he was in flood-ravaged New Orleans in 2006, he roamed the streets looking through the trash people carted out of ruined homes and collected their warped old records, then began working with those too.

But New Orleans also inspired a more ambitious salvage job -- the transformation of a discarded government trailer, the sort that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had bought by the tens of thousands for use as temporary shelters after Hurricane Katrina, then scrapped because they contained toxic fumes. Villinski has gutted a 30-foot Gulfstream trailer here in the Socrates Sculpture Park, just across the East River from Manhattan, and is turning it into a self-sustaining “Emergency Response Studio” that would enable an artist to set up shop in a disaster zone such as New Orleans while spotlighting the "absurd on many levels" waste in the government's emergency housing program in the Gulf region.

Indeed, the project is destined for that area, as part of “Prospect.1 New Orleans,” a biennial exhibition opening Nov. 1 of works by dozens of artists, many inspired by the hurricane and its aftermath: Los Angeles' Mark Bradford is building a wooden ark, using the shell of a deserted home; Jamaica-born Nari Ward is creating a new version of a bulldozed church that was in a converted boxing ring, embracing the two symbols of self-empowerment; and Wangechi Mutu, originally from Kenya, is creating a "ghost house" where a local woman was cheated by a contractor, who built a foundation, then absconded with her money.

"We'll have paintings too, pretty paintings, sad paintings and a lot of photography," said Dan Cameron, a former curator at Manhattan's New Museum who is organizing the show with support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, among others.

The 48-year-old Villinski began his career as a painter, then segued into three-dimensional work. The son of an Air Force navigator who had the family constantly on the move, he figures his interest in discarded objects may have stemmed from "a kind of feeling of low self-esteem. I actually felt I didn't deserve things that were terrific out of the box. . . ." Villinski doesn't get too deep with this sort of speculation, however, noting that before the beer cans and old gloves, "I rescued British sports cars for a while."