I sometimes dream about wearing a chain made of gold. In my dreams, it shines and is pure, the gold arranged in a herringbone pattern all around my neck. The chain I encountered during Pioneer Square Art Walk a week and a half ago, assembled by the Argentina-born, Seattle-based artist Hernan Paganini, is less metallically pure and larger than I'd dreamt, but just as beautiful. And swaggy.

Paganini's gold chain is part of a project done in collaboration with Recology CleanScapes. The company hosts a five-month-long artist-in-residence program (AIR) where King County artists are granted access to go through discarded materials at the company's facility to find materials to make pieces with. This year's artists, Paganini and Susan Robb, currently have their work on display in a Pioneer Square gallery space where their projects—Robb's Luxury Waste and Paganini's Retrato del Mundo Project—are running concurrently with one another.

Paganini's embroidery sculpture, "El Lujo Aparente," is made of 251 found metal objects, spray-painted a soft gold color. The sculpture takes up the entire wall in the gallery. When you sidle up close to it, it's easier to see all the different parts that came together to make the chain—a license plate, a shovel, a measuring cup, a saw, a baseball bat, a vent grate, a pair of scissors.

It is beautiful in all the odds and ends it brings together, a different sort of charm necklace. But the charms are things that real-life people found not so charming—enough to cast it out of their houses to live another life in the recycling facility. In seeing another use for these objects that were hauled off to the dump, "El Lujo Aparente" tells a story about us, our values, what we find valuable. It's as much a portrait as it is a giant sculpture. The show will be on display through Thursday, September 19th. Go check it out for yourself.

Close up of the sculpture--I spy a key!
Close up of the sculpture—I spy a key! Jasmyne Keimig