When asked in an interview what he thought of recycling, the sculptor B. Wurtz replied earnestly, "I wish I could take my egg carton to the store and have them refill it with eggs." His rickety conglomerations recycle what the rest of us view as trash—mesh fruit sacks and wood scavenged from the streets, those ubiquitous plastic grocery bags, objects that barely register at all—into surpassingly delicate sculptures. Are the gathered, dark-red topknots of a net bag innately beautiful? Or do these scraps of detritus rely on Wurtz's discerning eye to unlock their potential, like Miche langelo's figures awaiting their release from marble blocks? One five-foot-high piece feels like a sad-sack bivouac: A plastic shopping bag, absurdly printed in camouflage, is hung above two bags patterned with vertical stripes, one red, the other blue, tenuously anchored to weathered boards by thick wire and clothespins. This pathetic campsite, all gossamer plastic gently flailing in the air conditioner currents, is touchingly beautiful, a fragile transmutation of civilization's most prosaic trappings into something elusive... More >>>