There’s excess in America, and you can call it what you like: consumer culture, throw-away culture, single serve mentality, just about any such phrase will do. In the end it boils down to nothing but depressing statistics about pounds of textile waste and plastics and worse which won’t degrade for a million years. Those are ugly incontrovertible facts, and alas, no reinterpretation of those statistics is beautiful. However, there are people out there who function a little like magicians, turning these statistics into something full of wonder. This magician artist takes what is obviously one thing and transforms it into something else.

This is the growing field of Recycled Art.

In Salem, there’s a little known secret spot on the road to the Ferry which I like to call the Sculpture Garden.  Inside a gated and slightly unkempt backyard is a menagerie of welded behemoths, dragons, curiosities.  It’s possible to…