"I use recycled material for economic and environmental reasons," Ozawa says. "Materials are very expensive, and, as an artist, you have to be very resourceful. Besides, using recycled material has very little impact on the environment."

Her installation work Help VI is now on display—along with the work of two other artists, Debra Koppman and Leticia Garcia—at Sunnyvale Creative Arts Center Gallery, 550 E. Remington Drive.

The exhibition, titled "Cycles, Recycles," features artworks made of recycled materials. It runs through Dec. 21.

"Cycles and recycles have a circular meaning. It can mean to start all over again," says Jan Rindfleisch, director of De Anza College's Euphrat Museum of Art, which hosts the exhibition. "The exhibit shows how three artists examine the meaning of life cycles with recycled material."

Ozawa says she wants to challenge the viewers to reflect on the ideal way of American life in Help VI. The large installation is composed of a white picket fence, Astroturf, and 49 colorful whirligigs made of the redwood she collected from dumpsters. When a viewer walks by, motion detectors activate the whirligigs to spin and small "help" signs to pop up and down.

"On the surface, it looks like a perfect place to raise a family," Ozawa says. "But the irony is that it's only a fantasy. It is a fabrication of middle-class happiness."

The whirligigs are her tools to critique the fascistic, hidden or denied aspects of American family life, she adds.

Ozawa says her desire to explore the constructions of American identity and childhood for cultural identity has to do with her family background. Ozawa is a Sansei (third-generation Japanese-American). Some of her family—including grandparents, parents and other relatives—lived at internment camps during World War II, while family members on her father's side survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing.

"My interest in 'visibilizing' culture comes from having felt the suffocating power of silence and denial by the U.S. government during World War II," Ozawa says. "I use familiar forms and images to expose and question cultural values, how we raise children and how we live on a daily basis."

Garcia, like Ozawa, also wants to encourage her viewers to rethink how their identities are constructed through her works, 10 stuffed animals she dissected and resembled. Some stuffed animals have three eyes, two heads or three legs.

"In the same way I pieced the stuffed animals together, I want to show people how their identities were distorted and how they pieced together their identities," says Garcia, a film student at UC-Santa Cruz.

Life is also a central theme of Koppman's sculptures.

"Every recycled material has its own story," says Koppman, an artist in residence at Sequoia Elementary School in Oakland. "I like to use what's available, at hand, and give it a new life story."

Koppman started making artwork with recycled materials in 1997. When her daughter, Julia, was in preschool, parents were asked to collect various materials for a school project.

"I was the best parent scavenger," she says. "I collected way more toilet paper rolls than they needed. By the time I turned in my contributions, I had an idea to create a hanging piece from them. Then I just started seeing everything as potential materials."

Ten of her sculptures are displayed in the exhibition. While Owl and Iguana look more realistic, the rest of her works—such as Star Gazer, I Wish and Standing Tall Copper—stand like Native American totem poles and convey a mythic quality.

Koppman says she is inspired by folktales that tell of fantastical creatures, powerful goddesses and inanimate objects that come to life.

"I hope to convey a sense of connection to things that are very ancient but at the same time don't look like anything anyone has ever seen before," she says.

The exhibition "Cycles, Recycles" runs through Dec. 21 at Sunnyvale Creative Arts Center Gallery, 550 E. Remington Drive, Sunnyvale. For more information, call 408.730.7731.