Morning Edition, May 1, 2009 · A pill bottle, a losing lottery ticket, a broken umbrella, a long-forgotten trophy: Mostly, we consider these items detritus awaiting garbage collection.
Artist Jean Shin collects them and finds artistic meaning and symbolism in these castoffs. Her creations go on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
Shin, a 38-year-old Korean-American from Bethesda, Md., creates art that encourages people to look more carefully. Her piece Everyday Monuments, for example, appears at first to simply be a mass of sports trophies.
But the little gold bowling figures are handling strollers, not bowling balls; the basketball players are holding hammers; the soccer player holds a typewriter and the cheerleader serves up a dish of food.
The champions, in this case, are those who do ordinary, essential work but "aren't getting trophies today," Shin says.
