Changing minds in GAGA land

AUSTIN (KXAN) - One day she just did it. She sat down at her computer and posted a message on Craigslist.

"Just threw it out there into the universe," Lisa Stevens said. "I said, 'Okay, whatever, I don’t care, I need somebody to respond; is anybody out there, anybody who cares this same way?"

Across town, Molly Whitten was perusing Craigslist when she more or less exploded.

"I was jumping up and down," said Whitten. "I was all like, ‘Who is this? Who is in my brain? This is everything I’ve ever dreamed of and la, la, la, la."

This is where the story gets interesting. You see, Lisa and Molly did not really know each other, but they had met, coincidentally, two weeks earlier. It was Lisa who snapped to what was happening first.

"Molly," she emailed, "it's Lisa."

They put their creative juices together and in no time at all, they opened a little art gallery in South Austin. They called it, GAGA, which stands for Greater Austin Garbage Arts. The only artists they consider at GAGA are those who use reclaimed materials for at least 50 percent of their work. That is reclaimed, not recycled. The idea is to use stuff that cannot be recycled and would otherwise wind up in a landfill.

One of the first artists to join up was Baruzuala. It is like Cher, she explained. One look at her and you know she couldn’t possibly have a first and last name. It would be too normal. There are tattoos, of course, but that is not all. Baruzuala speaks with her eyes. They widen and glisten when she makes her points. Above those eyes, her brows feature alternating swaths of color, dark and light. A couple of silver rings dangle from pierced holes in her bottom lip. The eyes and lips are framed by cascades of blond dreadlocks, tipped with colorful hair wraps. Which leads us back to upcycling. The hair wraps are made from tiny beads and other items Baruzuala assembled from pieces of things she took apart. Deconstructing as she calls it.

This upcycler is also a shadow puppeteer. She makes her puppets, you guessed it, from reclaimed materials. An old and damaged doll, for example, loses her legs and gets fitted with some stuff that looks like a tail fin. Baruzuala cut the dolls arms and then reconnected them with bits of wire. Longer wires attach to the fin and arms. A light plasters the resulting mermaid’s shadow onto a wall and she comes to life, gyrating, swaying and dancing.

Then there is the vest. Pieced together from scraps of fabric and festooned with bells, bottle caps and a deconstructed necklace, it will make a lovely jingling sound when Baruzuala does some dancing of her own. She is also a belly dancer and a fire dancer, you see.

Such is the realm of upcycling. Such is the realm of GAGA land, a land in which the goal is not just to upcycle art, but to upcycle life, itself.

"Don't buy Tupperware," Whitten urged. "Use your old mayonnaise jar; don't throw it out. Just scrub the label off, you know, and there you go. You can paint it up; you can decorate it; you can do whatever you want."

The woman who reached out to the universe and found a willing Whitten echoes the thought.

"It is essential," she said, "that we change our minds about how we navigate the planet."