thea: the trouble with trash is...

...it looks like trash. And the greatest enemy of trash? Cleaning ladies. Do you see where I am going with this?
The long and the short of it is that with the exception of the umbrella and the fan propeller, which I had left in the yard by accident, the program house cleaning ladies threw out everything I had collected so far despite the large orange "NOT TRASH" sign that lay on top of all of it. If you will bear with a small tangent right now, the label NOT TRASH is actually one that found me. Last year I was working in a studio with a few other students and doing a project that had a found art component and one day I came in to find all of my stuff which had been spread over a work table, piled in a corner with a piece of balsa wood on top on which was scrawled "NOT TRASH". I still don't know who wrote it but I really appreciated the gesture and I liked how the things had been piled defensively, so much so that I ended up using many of the elements in my final piece that had occurred accidentally in the pile. Since then "NOT TRASH" had become sort of a calling card for my work, something that whoever I am living with knows to avoid, and up til now, it had worked.
So now it's time to recoup. In order to recover in quantity what I have lost, I have asked my housemates to be on the look out for junk that they themselves are throwing out, salvaging it before it hits the can, rather than after wards. Thankfully, given the nature of our new plan, this is possible without violating the inherent truth of my project. It is no longer about the individual objects but about the symbolism as a whole. Lets see where we can go from here.