It’s a familiar story: During the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sonja Dapper was taking lots of walks around her Como Park neighborhood, in search of something to do.
“It kind of bothers me to see plastic things that will never decompose,” she said. “Three hundred years from now, this doll part will still be here. I was picking these things up, and then I started wondering if there’s anything I can do with them.”
She found a photo of an artist inspiration, Frida Kahlo, and turned the junk she’d collected into a detailed collage portrait. Then she made another collage. And another.
Until Jan. 31, Dapper’s art — under the moniker of the “junk art junkie” — is on display in the main atrium of the Ramsey County Library’s Roseville branch. Some are of famous faces like Prince and Paul McCartney, and others, like a portrait of an Indigenous woman, are inspired by powerful photos.
Each artwork takes a month or more to complete, Dapper said. One of her largest works, a greyscale portrait of Abe Lincoln, involved more than a year of work.
This is partly just because she gets busy, she said, but the portraits are also exceptionally detailed. Stand close up, and you’ll see how intricately the layers of buttons, zippers, doll parts, toys and plastic silverware are nestled together; look from far away and Dapper’s skill makes the perfectly color-matched piece of rubbish melt into rippling fabric and emotive eyes.
And about the colors: No paint involved. If she wants a specific shade, she has to go find it. As one might expect, she has amassed quite the collection of junk in her home studio, and it’s all color-coded. Each color category — pink, red, brown, so on — has its own bin, and skin tones, which are harder to source and match, are sorted with greater detail.
In Dapper’s works, the junk is more than the building material; it’s part of the story of the portrait’s subject. You might find army men hidden in the Lincoln portrait, for example, or plastic zombie toys in her portrait of horror actor Vincent Price. In her own self-portrait, she included mementos passed down from her mother and pieces of a champagne cork from a bottle popped on a special occasion.
Even before she became the junk art junkie, Dapper has always treasured things other people might’ve considered trash.
Much of her early artwork, which was textile-based, involved deconstructing and reconstructing garments and other accessories. Almost all her clothes are thrifted, she said. And she works at the Roseville library, which is not exactly coincidental.
“I just love the idea of reuse and sharing resources, which is why the library is such a good fit for me,” she said. “This little bit that I’m keeping out of the landfill isn’t going to change the world, but you always want to start conversations. Maybe people can think about it a little more.”
Dapper is on Instagram at @junkartjunkie and on Facebook by searching “Junk Art Junkie (Sonja Dapper).”
Her work is on display till Jan. 31 in the atrium of the library in Roseville; 2180 North Hamline Ave.
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