My name is Tony Sapporo.
I am living in Brooklyn, New York, in that lovely
neighborhood of Bed-Stuy.
I'm a production designer and prototype maker
for commercial advertising and private clients,
and I've been doing that for about ten years.
My art practice varies
from photography to paintings and illustrations,
and more recently, like furniture making and design
and architecture and forms and plant life
and all those that are the things that inspire me.
I'm trying to think of what else does.
There was something else.
Friends.
Christina in particular.
trying to think of what else inspires me.
I feel like there's something else.
Fashion.
That's exactly what it is.
Fashion, architecture.
And. And, you know, plant life inspired me.
I love floral arrangements, flowers and stuff of that nature.
So it's pretty exciting to feed off of that.
And translate that into
beauty and
like pieces that resonate with me.
I take time off,
I think, from production design like I am for this month.
But sometimes I try to squeeze everything in
and the energy that I have is unparalleled.
I don't know how to explain it.
You know, I constantly am involved with something
and making stuff or creating something for somebody else.
And, you know, I think depending on which direction
I'm working in, whether it's for myself or somebody else, the pull goes
towards the opposite for like the longing to get to that other thing.
So I think they balance themselves out.
At this point, that's how it feels.
I don't like try to cram as much as I
once was a year ago, so
what motivates me to live and work sustainably is seeing
just the amount of waste that the city has in all spectrums for what I do.
So I think that that's what motivates me, is
I like to give things Second Life at least, and all this stuff.
Well, the majority of the stuff that I'm working on right now
is all reclaimed materials from previous projects that I've collected
and saved with the intention of making these new works.
So I try to like give them a second life because a lot of it's
like really good material.
And I try to pass
that along to other people if they need it or if they could use it.
And I try to make things
look as if they were brand new objects,
you know, without ever,
you know, touching the street.
And some of these things do come from the street.
Some of them are like, found objects.
And then I redesign them and repurpose them and refinish them.
And then other things are just like materials from previous projects
where I knew, like for coincidentally, like I was planning on already
making a lot of the items that I'm working on and
I had planned with
like the materials for that project that I was doing previously
to repurpose those materials from the beginning.
So because typically that stuff just goes straight to waste to like a dump.
And you know, I've been doing this for so long
and I've worked with so many people that like
their hearts break when they see, like either the work that they've done
go straight to the garbage or just like the quality
of the materials, you know, they just get thrown away right away.
And then going back into like the city itself,
it just people are just constantly throwing away personal items.
And I think a lot of those goods are reusable.
And I kind of keep an eye out for garbage all the time.
I'm looking to
work with people in like a scope where they understand
that there's a
spectrum of limitation when it comes to like
creating something for them from, you know, like upcycled goods.
But I think if they're flexible with that,
then we can make something really unique for them.
And I think that working with other people
allows them to, like spread the word of like what they've got as a unique piece
and it creates a, you know, like a recycled
cycle and essentially, I don't know.
Yeah, I want to like design objects for people.
And I enjoyed designing.
It's like my biggest passion.
I think.
So to be able to like repurpose stuff, whether it's materials
or found objects, I think that that's like the joy that I get from
it is to be able to like, give it a second like and like I said,
make it look like it's brand new and it's not junk
because the before and after photos of some of the stuff that I've found,
you know, it's like,
I don't know, that's like my thrill is to like, see it come to reality.
In an angry sense?
No, what makes me SoMad is
the amount of waste, the amount of waste
and the amount of time that we all have
and like the lack of it really