MARR’s mission is to challenge the perception of waste culture by providing a unique platform for artists at the intersection of art, community, and waste systems. The Moab area is highly impacted by the tourism industry and, as a result, waste management. By facilitating artists’ direct engagement with the waste stream, MARR encourages resident artists to consider their studio practice through the lens of sustainability and to thoughtfully re-assess their processes of material sourcing and waste disposal.

 

Through a 4-week residency, the program offers artists studio space, project and community facilitation, a stipend, access to materials at local waste disposal sites, and the time and space to focus solely on their art. As a component of each residency, artists spend time providing opportunities for learning, dialog and enrichment within the community.

The idea of an Open Lab comes from the Fablab which is an openly accessible fabrication workshop with various propriertery machinery such as 3D printers, laser cutters and CNC mills. These propriertary machines listed on the Fablab Inventory List which is an exhaustive list of machinery that can be bought and installed to setup up a fablab locally. These proprietary machines are relatively expensive and propietary and shipping from the US to lesser developed countries can be prohibitively expensive. Lastly propiertary machines can never really be owned and users are locked within the company ecosystem. So an Open Lab is basically a fab lab with open source hardware machinery instead of proprietary machinery.