It was always just there – part of the backdrop outside the St. Paul studio Twin Cities-based artist Michael Kareken has worked in for decades.

Then, one day, the paper recycling plant he’d long viewed from his window became something more – a portal of sorts … a gateway to a long artistic journey.

“I was doing really different work at the time,” recalls Kareken of the day inspiration struck back in 2006, leading to much of the work that will be on display in Salvage, an exhibition of paintings and drawings inspired by scrap and recycling facilities in the Twin Cities area that will be on display from Sept. 15 through Oct. 24 in the Alice R. Rogers and Target Galleries at Saint John’s University.

“It didn’t have to do with anything that related to this. But there was an exhibition at the (Minneapolis College of Art and Design) where I was on the faculty. The theme was art and sustainability. I wasn’t sure I could come up with anything like that. But I was talking to the curator and I said, ‘Maybe this recycling plant would be an interesting subject. I should check it out.’ So I walked over there one day, knocked on the door and told them I was an artist. They looked at me a little cross-eyed at first. But the manager was interested in art. He said he’d give me the tour.

“And that was that,” he continued. “It was one of those strange things where I wasn’t expecting it, but once I walked through that plant, I found myself thunderstruck by the scale of it all. Suddenly, it became the most interesting thing in the world – the shapes and the colors. They had these huge piles that from a distance don’t look that big. But when you’re standing next to then, they’re 30 feet in the air and like 200 feet long. It was this fresh, new, unexpected thing. I’d been staring at it out my window for years and never given it a second thought. But confronting it on that scale raised so many questions – where is this stuff coming from and what happens to it? So I started trying to answer them.”

That led him to explore other spots in the area, like metal scrapyards in Minneapolis, a bottle factory in Shakopee, a neighborhood recycling plant near his studio with glass, aluminum and more, and finally auto salvage lots. Those locations inspired 15 years’ worth of work, including the pieces now on display at SJU.

“It’s funny, because while it’s one whole body of work, there are different sections of it that have different meanings,” he said. “It evolved over time as I worked on the series. At the beginning, I didn’t understand why I was attracted to it. It was like falling in love. You can’t really explain it. But once I got immersed in it, I began to ask myself questions. Because a lot of people wondered what I was doing. I was starting to make big things that were pretty impractical. But I felt this compulsion.

“Then I began to understand my connection to it. It had a personal resonance – a connection I forged with it.”

“(The auto salvage drawings) were the last ones I did, and they came at a time when my parents were starting to have health problems,” he continued. “I was thinking about mortality … time passing, that kind of thing. These cars were all torn apart and they looked like bodies. It was like an autopsy or something. Very human in a way.

“So I made a whole series of these drawings that were close-ups of the sections of the cars. I called it Parts, and it just was like a feeling of this assembly or, you know, dissolution or breaking down.”

Kareken grew up in the Pacific Northwest and met his wife, a Minnesota native, on the East Coast. The couple moved back to the Twin Cities in 1993 and have been here ever since.

This exhibition, though, marks his first time displaying his work at CSB and SJU.

“Becky (Pflueger, the gallery manager at CSB and SJU) reached out to me,” he said. “I did end up selling a bunch of this work. But I had a lot left piled up in my studio and this was a great opportunity to get it out in the world again. To let it have another life. Last fall, I had a show with more or less the same body of work at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona. Actually fewer pieces than this. But when his opportunity came up, it was like ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’”

Kareken has connections to these campuses. His wife’s father and other family members attended SJU, including her uncle Mathew Ahmann, a 1952 graduate who was appointed founding director of the National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice in 1960, and who was among those to speak before Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington in August 1963.

He was also deeply involved in the 1965 civil rights marches in Selma, helping draw clergy and other religious figures from across the country to take part in the campaign.

“She has some strong connections here, but I’d never been up until I came to see the gallery space,” Kareken said. “Then I was floored by this amazing campus and these buildings.”

That makes Kareken even more excited to share his work in the current exhibition, which ranges from intricate charcoal drawings and large-scale oil paintings to landscape views of the recycling facilities and detailed close-ups of the material itself.

“There are different bodies of work, so there’s different ways to respond,” he said. “I hope that people can see the differences in the way the work is put together … the imagery, the way it’s composed, all that stuff.

“But I’d also hope people would engage in the complexity of the subject matter and see it kind of like I did. That this stuff could belong to any of us. It’s stuff that comes out of the life we’ve built for ourselves as human beings and we all have a hand in.

“I don’t see it as propagandistic or anything,” he continued. “But hopefully it might make people reconsider how they use these things, and maybe even get involved in changing things about the way they use it.”