Article by Cate McQuaid
Originally Published in the Boston Globe, Friday April 30, 2004

Sophia Ainslie’s raucous and aromatic installation at HallSpace comprises a one-ton bundle or recycled plastic bottles, a giant collage of drawings, and iris prints of photos of the bundled bottles. It all works rather well. Ainslie got the bundle up to the gallery, then clipped some of the strapping and let the piece decompress – it has bloomed like a junkyard daisy, although it smells more like laundry detergent. The drawings of bottles fill up the wall: The jugs move together like bodies in an orgy. But the iris prints are the prize: they may be simple images of trash, but they look like wildly gestural, decorative abstract paintings; it’s here where Ainslie transcends garbage and makes us see beauty.