Ten days ago, a small corps of volunteers started picking up random bags of trash from Philly curbs and bringing them to the tarp-covered floor of Crane Arts’ Icebox space for Ryan McCartney and Tim Belknap’s evolving multidisciplinary installation “Refuse Reuse: Language for the Common Landfill.” The culmination of their efforts at the closing party tonight won’t look (or smell) like the result of a trash strike, though, says McCartney. There will be no organic material, and the pickers tried to “avoid anything that’s obviously dripping.” But it won’t look like a touring Found magazine show, either, with its focus on diamonds in the rough — what McCartney and Belknap find so interesting is the rough itself. Each of the trash bags lining the curb every week, says McCartney, “is this little time capsule of anonymous information — this little collapsed space of one week of your life.” That’s the reason their crew of artists and writers who will be taking some of the refuse and interpreting them to make completely new pieces of writing, which will be bound up in a book and on display along with the various trash “artifacts” that inspired them, arranged by size, shape and probably color. 

Closing reception Wed., Nov. 28, 6 p.m., free, Crane Arts Building, 1400 N. American St., 215-232-3203, cranearts.com.