Rossa Cole Shows a Decade of Recycled Art in Springs

When East Hampton events photographer Rossa Cole got serious about creating art more than a decade ago, his work quickly turned to environmental concerns. He combed local beaches for trash and detritus that washed up from the plastic-filled sea, or were left behind by people littering and messing up the very thing they were there to enjoy. He then turned that trash into beautiful and compelling objects and compositions.

Now, with his biggest show of new work ever this weekend, with painter Dee Coss at Ashawagh Hall in Springs (780 Springs Fireplace Road), Cole is continuing his efforts recycling materials, but the range of his vision is far more vast. He brings in early work like “Carnival of the Animals” (2014) — a life-size assault rifle made with children’s books that sends a clear message — but he also shares an array of assemblage and mixed media pieces that are more subtle, and perhaps formal, in their meaning. Some simply exist as pieces of art that are lovely to look at, but all also use only materials that would have otherwise ended up in landfills or, God forbid, beaches and the sea.

“I’ve been going into my studio and plugging away for about 10 years now. And nobody’s really seen the scope of what I’ve been up to,” Cole says, acknowledging the wide range of work he’s presenting this weekend and how it came to fruition. The size of the work, for example, was once limited by his lack of heat in the studio, which led him to create in a smaller area, where a space heater could reach. Family obligations also took him from the studio a little earlier most days.

“For a lot of time, it was 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and then the kids started getting out of school later and later, so now I basically have all day. So I can go there and just plug away at stuff.”

Much of what Cole creates is dictated by what he finds. “Exactly how a lot of these pieces get made is the thing I found that morning becomes the starting point. I’ll be going to the dump and I’ll see a bunch of frames and I’ll be like, oh wow, I have this stash of pennies I’ve been saving for no good reason over the years, and I’ll just kind of match things together.”

He refers to a series of pieces featuring vintage action figures and toy cars centered on a framed field of pennies encased in resin, like “Boba Fett in the Shine of Obsolescence” (2018), which uses the original Kenner Boba Fett figure from 1979 surrounded by a field of shiny copper pennies in a black frame, or “Wet Nellie” (2018) with a small, 1978 Corgi version of James Bond’s 007 Lotus Esprit submarine on pennies in a white frame, among several others.

Cole says he’s pleased that his unusual creations are something artificial intelligence could not create, physically or perhaps conceptually. “I pride myself a little bit on that. When people started making all this AI art, I was like, OK, AI, I dare you to try and make something like I would make. I often think, even if AI could come up with some of these concepts, they would never put it together this way, because I’m using a fugue state. I don’t know if AI can get into a fugue state,” he explains.

Pointing to “Art For Ai #2 – Red Yellow Dots” (2017), which is a compulsively made grid of semi-square white wooden bits, each with one red and one yellow dot applied to it, he says, “I got kind of into a Zen state, where I was just painting… for weeks I was just putting a yellow dot, putting a red dot, putting a yellow dot, putting a red dot…”

Citing another wild example of where his creativity takes him, Cole recalls, “At one point when I was in the city I found this spot — it was just this recycling spot for artists, and I got like maybe 50 or 100 cellphones and then I started digging the little vibrating motors out of them and putting those into bamboo sticks and attaching a solar panel to the little motor. So if you put the sticks in the sun, they vibrate. It was just a really weird, fun thing. I called them ‘Solar War Sticks’ and they had all kinds of cool little decorations on them. That kind of thing…”

In a more obvious nod to his environmental message, Cole presents several “Atmosphere” paintings, layering household junk and weaving it into layers of paint to reflect the layers of the atmosphere, or “Crapmoshere” — as one new piece from 2024 calls it — and what he describes as our lack of concern for nature in general. “I have lately become obsessed with the atmosphere. depictions of it and its delicacy should be circulated,” he adds.

“These pieces hope to bring awareness to the plight of the things we throw out as well as to remind the viewer that we can use this waste for other means, in this case, art,” Cole says.

“People talk a big talk about recycling, but lots of recent articles have showed that our efforts do diddly squat. And it’s really the big corporations. It’s Coca Cola and all these people producing all the plastic who are to blame in a large way for not setting up systems where the plastic can go back in the first place,” Cole says, adding later, “In a way, maybe the atmosphere could be the great peacemaker of the world? A butterfly flaps its wings in South America, it’s a hurricane in China.”

And, he says, everyone should be able to agree on the things that threaten our very survival.

See Rossa Cole and painter Dee Coss in Two Local Artists Occupy Ashawagh Hall this Friday–Sunday, June 14–16.