Graphic Design by Jennifer Herzig and Ed Smith. Flash Implimented by Alan Bedian.

Nancy Spiller is a writer and artist currently living in Los Angeles. A California native, she was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a graduate of San Francisco State University with a B.A. in English. She served as staff feature writer at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the San Jose Mercury News and its Sunday magazine, West. She was editor and internationally syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate's Entertainment News Service. Her freelance essays and articles have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers including California, Cooking Light, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, McCall's, Mother Jones, New West, New York Magazine, Rolling Stone, Salon.com, US, USA Today Weekend, Travel & Leisure, and Coagula Art Journal. Her fiction has appeared in the Rain City Review. She has studied art at the San Francisco Academy of Art, Pasadena Art Center College of Design and UCLA. Her work has been exhibited in both Northern and Southern California, and she has illustrated her own articles with photographs and paintings. She is an active member of Green Peace, Slow Food and the Sierra Club and currently serves on the board of the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR). With her Tibetan terrier, Dalai, she has won multiple blue ribbons for agility.

Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project
Los Angeles and Chicago
Curated and Organized by Nancy Spiller and Barbara Hashimoto The Junk Mail Project began on January 1, 2006 with the collection for one calendar year of the junk mail delivered daily to my Southern California home. On December 31, 2006, I had 157 pounds of this unsolicited material which I then hauled to a commercial shredding company to shred, bag and drive back home. Seven-45 gallon black garbage bags full of this material lurked in the corner of my garage as I began developing an installation to utilize this year's worth of waste.

Lamey Whinehouse is a site specific installation fabricated for the Rolling Stone Ex-Employee Reunion's No-Talent Show on September 29, 2007 in San Francisco, California.

Her name is Zhang Yin, she's worth more money than Oprah Winfrey and she wants your junk mail! She's made more than 3.4 billion dollars (27 billion yuan) importing America's waste paper, including junk mail, to China. Her company, Nine Dragons, China's largest container board maker, returns it to us as packaging on inexpensive, and oft recalled, made-in-China merchandise. According to the China Daily News, the "Waste Paper Queen" is "extremely" fast talking, still she has yet to talk the Chinese into recyling more of their paper waste. Only 30 percent of their scrap paper is reused, while Americans salvage 70 percent. Most of China's waste paper is still buried or burned, while our's is exported to entreprenuers such as Zhang Yin. America remains number one in paper production, but China is now the world's second largest producer of paper at 49.5 million tons and the second largest consumer at 54.4 million tons. So how much paper is that? I can't imagine. My mind's eye got bloodshot trying to picture it. Artist Chris Jordan resorts to digital imagery to see this kind of stuff. His "Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait" is an effort to visualize our country's habits of consumption. He does giant, digitally generated photographs capturing the millions of soda cans, plastic bags, trees cut for mail order catalogs and cell phones we run through in the course of our average consumer days. He does it so we can see what the unimaginable and astronimical look like. A similar impulse prompted me to start "Reverse Trash Streams: The Junk Mail Project." I wanted to see what each day's demanding demi-mound added up to in the course of a year. My visualization exercise resulted in 157 pounds of shredded junk mail to be installed at the L.A. Contemporary Gallery in Culver City November 9-24. And since I started the project I have encountered other artists trying to make apparent what we might hear or read about but can't picture in our minds. Like Stan's Cafe, a six Brit theater troupe, presenting their performance installation "Of All The People In All The World: The Americas," at Los Angeles' Skirball Cultural Center November 29-December 30, 2007. They use grains of rice to represent individuals, then measure these into piles both massive and mini to illustrate such statistics as the paltry number of women who have served in the U.S. Senate and the 8 million people living in America's gated communities. They will use 16.5 tons of rice during the work's run. It's a number I find hard to conceive of, so, I guess, I'll just have to get up there and see it for myself.

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