Trashy

Trashy (2026) by Bryce Benton

Mixed media assemblage — foil, paper, plastic waste, Spanish moss, Ball moss, succulents, and living substrate.

“Trashy” sits at the intersection of decay and renewal, transforming the aftermath of a simple meal into a living monument of care and contradiction. The work gathers the remnants of a Torchy’s order — receipt, salsa cups, spoon, paper bowl, and a single lime slice — and weaves them into a nest of Spanish and Ball moss, all resting on a foil-and-cardboard base. These discarded elements, still faintly marked by their consumer origins, become both artifact and organism within the sculpture’s living ecology.

In the language of Organic Media, the piece performs Adaptive Reuse and Waste Integration simultaneously: fast food detritus is not hidden or condemned but reinterpreted as habitat — an act of Trash Magic, where the boundary between refuse and resource dissolves.

There’s a quiet tenderness in the arrangement — the lid protecting a pool of water, the moss curling through plastic, the crumpled receipt like a pressed leaf of human trace. The composition evokes the fragility of contemporary consumption and the persistence of life that threads through it, forming what might be called a Verdancy Pact between waste and growth.

In the lineage of Urban Greening and Organic Fiction, “Trashy” offers not a protest but a proposition: that our leftovers are already gesturing toward their next life, waiting only for a hand — or a moss — to begin the transformation.