Meet sTo Len: The Reuse Artist

Last month, Earth Angel donated 6 pallets of flowers to sTo Len – A genre fluid artist with interests in printmaking, installation, sound, video and performance. Based in Queens, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, sTo’s work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions and politics.

We talked to sTo about art activism, recycling waste into art materials, and creating a community Trash Museum in Kyrgyzstan.

What inspired you to explore topics like climate change and environmental justice concerns in your work?

I’ve lived in NYC for over 2 decades and have always been fascinated with places in the city where the urban industrial landscape meets the natural world. What first began as a search for a cool place to hang out by the water slowly turned into me learning more about the history of these sites, many of which happened to be heavily polluted or even designated Superfund sites.  

I then started to explore ways that I could collaborate with these places as an artist. I wound up creating work with and about polluted waterways, landfills, and wastewater simply because that is what I was experiencing here in the city.

The climate crisis is interconnected with so many important issues and I really feel an urgency to do my part to help create a dialogue about it in my own way.

Earth Angel recently helped a client re-home 6 pallets of flowers to your studio – What can you share about your process? Where can we see your work?

Thanks so much for that! I started as an artist in residence at the Queens Botanical Garden a few months ago and have been interested in finding ways to collaborate with plants in my work. Inspired by a workshop that I attended at the garden, I have been making a series of anthotypes which is an early form of photography that dates back to the mid 1800s. The chemical-free process involves extracting photosensitive pigments from plants and flowers and creating a colorful, light sensitive emulsion that can develop images under the sun. Your flower delivery came at a perfect time as I was wanting to experiment with creating large batches of plant pigments in my studio and I ended up using the daffodils, tulips, and hyacinths for many prints. I always try to recycle as many of my materials as possible and so it was extra special that I could give your flowers another creative life. I currently have a durational 6 month exhibition at the Queens Botanical Garden where you can see all of these prints and more as I am continually adding to the show until it closes in September on the Autumnal Equinox.

How do nature and waste inform your creations?

I find them both endlessly inspiring in different ways. Nature is really the best artist and teacher and I continually try to make collaborative work with the natural world so that I can learn from her and surprise myself in the process. A big on-going lesson for me has a lot to do with giving up total control and maintaining a more fluid and adaptive way of working. Waste on the other hand, is an unfortunate aspect of life but I appreciate the challenge of trying to work with it as both a physical material and a larger all encompassing subject.  We generally have a disconnect with our own waste stream and I see that as fertile ground for making work. When nature and waste tragically meet, there is often an ugly beauty that emerges which I also find compelling to investigate and work from within.

As an artist, how did you get involved with the NY Department of Sanitation?

There was an open call to be the Public Artist in Residence at the NY Department of Sanitation, which is a program created by the NY Department of Cultural Affairs, and I applied and thankfully got it. I had previously been an artist in residence at a wastewater treatment facility in Virginia and loved working from within a city agency. I was ecstatic to work in the largest sanitation department in the world and ended up doing a two year long deep dive that included embedding among the workforce and resurrecting both a dormant sanitation printshop and a TV Studio. It has been a super impactful experience to stay the least and I am still working on lots of related projects from my tenure.

Are there any dream projects you haven’t found the right trash for yet?

Well, I am always looking! I was actually just in Kyrgyzstan late last year and created a Trash Museum on an operating landfill and that is now being run by both sanitation workers and environmental activists together. That was a dreamy project and one that I would love to continue to do all over the world.

Visit sTo Len’s Website: www.stoishere.com

Follow sTo on Instagram: @stoishere