His loft home and studio is in a four-story brick building that once housed three members of the Talking Heads rock band. On a recent day, his assistant was putting coats of luminous blue paint on some of the “beer can butterflies” that will adorn a wall at a company's offices in Oakland. Villinski turned the records he found in New Orleans into butterflies too, then started doing the same with his own LP collection, taking the vinyl that once played Fleetwood Mac and Jimmy Cliff and warping it into the delicate symbols of transformation. Some of the butterflies are attached by wires to old turntables, so they revolve, part of an installation ("the soundtrack of his life") destined for the Museum of Art and Design’s new building opening in September on Columbus Circle in Manhattan.
Our trash is this artist's treasure
Paul Villinski is turning a FEMA-style trailer into a studio (and beer cans into butterflies).
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Waste not, want not
The studio also had pieces of balsa wood laid out on a table, what had been the model for his trailer project until a parks employee cutting the grass at the sculpture park ran into it with his lawn mower while Villinski was out of town. "I got back last night and have been sorting through what's left," he said before setting out for the riverside site that was an illegal dump until sculptor Mark di Suvero led a campaign to put it to better use.
Villinski's "Emergency Response Studio" is one of 16 projects displayed there, or being created, as part of an environmentally themed "Waste Not, Want Not" show. His trailer is not actually one of the 143,123 FEMA bought from several manufacturers for $2.7 billion after Katrina, though Villinski did try to get one of those through a General Accounting Office website that was auctioning them off. But the government stopped the sale, and started buying the sold trailers back, because of the problem that turned the program into a fiasco -- formaldehyde fumes from glues used to secure rugs, plywood and other components.
Just this month, New Orleans officials said that on July 1 they will begin enforcing an ordinance prohibiting residents from continuing to live in the temporary shelters, nearly 5,000 of which remain in use in the city.
Villinski thus had to settle for a similar trailer, from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which was disposing this one through the GAO site after using it in Delaware, where it had been abandoned and taken over by a weasel and small rodents. "It cost $5,015, which was a premium price considering the condition," he said.
