Since arriving from St. Louis three years ago, collage sculptors Kelly Jimenez and Alejandro Franco have undertaken a creative crusade stretching Andy Warhol’s sourcing philosophy to its utmost possibilities.
As La Vispera Collective, they fashion large-scale installations that, from a distance, resemble classic Tiffany-style stained glass.
Take a closer look, and you’ll see deftly designed mosaics incorporating hundreds of single-use plastic packaging remnants repurposed from the artists’ own household waste.
The artistic message Jimenez and Franco hope to convey is driven by a simple urgency: how to best use castoff materials otherwise destined for a landfill to educate viewers about Earth’s existential ecological crisis.
Panels from “Plastisphere: A Sinking Reality,” a new installation from the duo that is La Vispera. Photo courtesy of La Vispera.
Their work has been featured by Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, Office of Public Art and Pittsburgh Creative Corps and in permanent installations at Tomayko Foundation and Community College of Allegheny County North Campus.
A 2024 Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh residency produced “Canopy: Nature’s Hidden Treasures”, an immersive storybook inspired by the Amazon rainforest. Recently, they won a coveted Construction Junction Artistic Reuse Award for a stained-glass piece made from reclaimed doors and windows and exhibited at Pittsburgh Botanic Garden.
Their newest public piece is “Plastisphere: A Sinking Reality,” currently displayed across the street-level windows of the Heinz 57 Center building at Sixth Avenue and Smithfield Street. Funded by a Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership placemaking grant, the nine-panel span portrays a glowing underwater world filled with ocean creatures and derived completely from single-use plastic on paper.
Particularly striking at night, the tableaux depicts both the beauty of marine life and the impact of our throwaway disposal culture that, regrettably, shows no signs of abating. According to a 2021 National Academy of Sciences study, the United States produces 46 million tons of plastic every year, the highest of any nation and more than 10% of the world total.
NEXTpittsburgh visited Jimenez and Franco at their South Side Slopes studio for a startup seminar in repurposed artmaking for environmental empowerment.
* * *
NEXTpittsburgh: Where in Colombia are you from?
Kelly Jimenez: I am from Bogotá.
Alejandro Franco: I was born in Medellín but also grew up in a smaller town called Cartago.
NEXTpittsburgh: When did you each get involved in making art?
Jimenez: I had an interest in making crafts since I was a little kid. I had many cousins older than me who were inspiring because they painted. They were musicians. They made graffiti. I always had a desire to learn what they were doing. I went to school for fashion design, because I thought that it would be a career that would teach me many things like sewing, painting, making illustrations. So I went for that. And I started working as an art director for a textile manufacturing company, and that’s where I had a chance to make creative things, like props for their sets and for photography and promoting purposes.
Franco: When you’re a kid, you are drawn by certain things, right? And it’s very clear then what you really like. One of the things that inspired me to take creativity seriously was my grandmother. For Halloween costumes, I would tell her what I wanted to be. And she would take it very, very seriously. She would make the costumes with great detail and accuracy. To me, that was showing how creativity can be taken to a really far place.
I had never been formally trained in art, but when I lived in Miami, I would pass by art supply stores and think, “I need to go in there.” I just felt that attraction. Eventually I bought paint and started painting. I jumped into making miniature set designs on cigar boxes, because I really like set designs, and that led me to do assemblages.
NEXTpittsburgh: Those are what you call “My Little Contraptions”?
Franco: It is where I first saw the artistic and expressive potential of castaway objects. That piece there (points to an assemblage of ostriches made of wood, paper, door hinges, plastic, wire) is part of a show called “Entering the dArk”. I made all the animals walking into Noah’s Ark. But instead of walking into an ark, they were walking into a black hole because it is a piece about animal extinction. The animals closer to the hole were those closer to becoming extinct.
NEXTpittsburgh: What was your first collaboration together?
Jimenez: At my job, I had gotten into stop motion animation, and I met Alejandro, who had a project with a friend we had in common. They called me to help them with the stop motion animation, and that was our first time we collaborated.
Franco: The piece she is talking about is a really fascinating piece we made. There is an actor performing on a stage with two different doors. Every time he leaves the stage, he is shown entering into a previously recorded video projected right above the stage. Sometimes that video shows him doing an activity, like he has a rope and throws it down a hole on the video, and then a real rope comes down from above him on stage.
NEXTpittsburgh: You’re using the video to create two plays running simultaneously.
Franco: Yes, and as he’s coming down in the video, and people are seeing him disappear down a hall, he physically comes down onto the stage from up above in one seamless sequence. Sometimes he will go into a fantastical world made out of stop motion animation, and maybe he will pick a flower in there and bring it back to the stage. Things like that. That was a really interesting project.
NEXTpittsburgh: How did you devise “Plastisphere?”
Jimenez: We wanted to address the issue of plastic overpopulation in our oceans. By scaling up a familiar household fish tank, we highlighted the beauty of underwater life in an urban setting. We also included a sunken ship, which is a common element in such tanks, as a way to symbolize our throwaway culture and the unsustainable nature of our consumption practices.
NEXTpittsburgh: When somebody takes a closer look at the panels, the packaging print and logos are visible. You chose to make them part of the palette?
Franco: We want people to recognize the brands and logos that are familiar to them. We want people to see those things in this piece and think about the connection with the products they use in their daily lives.
NEXTpittsburgh: What is the significance of La Vispera, the name you chose for your collective?
Jimenez: In Spanish, it means “the eve,” as being the day before something grand happens. Something momentous. Our art is concerned with environmental issues. The art is like a warning sign, or getting people to pay attention to what might be coming next in their environment.
Franco: We try to include nature in our work every chance we can and show how the ecosystem we live in is affected because of fossil fuels and plastic and petroleum and climate.
NEXTpittsburgh: Is there anything about the physical environment of Pittsburgh you’ve found useful for your art?
Franco: Yes! Pittsburgh has so many angles, the topography is so crazy. It reminds us of Colombia, because Colombia has a lot of hills, so a lot of interesting things happen when you have hills like that.
Jimenez: There are so many cool things about the architecture here. The variety of architecture in Pittsburgh is tremendous. If you go from neighborhood to neighborhood, you really see a bit of everything.
