Maine College of Art and Design

Silver Back Brewery

Ryer Spann, Quimby Danger

Silver Back Brewery is a proposed brewery, darkroom, and community space that transforms brewing waste into an environmental remediation tool. Using spent brewer’s yeast, the project captures and recovers silver from photographic fixer, preventing harmful contamination of local waterways. By linking beer production, film photography, and ecological stewardship through a closed-loop system, it creates a regenerative model where one process supports another. The project promotes sustainability, resource recovery, community engagement, and a cleaner future for analog photography.

Megan Valanidas is an industrial designer and studio artist with a focus in biomaterials, national security and existential threat. She focuses on nature, convenience, the role of chance and the inevitability of accidents to suggest methods, materials and strategies for a better tomorrow. Specializing in bio-based material application and interactivity, her work establishes and employs methods for designing our waste stream by collaborating with extra-human species such as locally present decomposers. She has lectured and exhibited her work nationally and internationally on the topics of biomaterials and their application. In addition to her work in biomaterials, Valanidas is a creative director with the Altimeter Design Group, where she specializes in speculative and discursive design and applying these tools to policy change and complex systems. In this capacity, she has collaborated and exhibited with groups including the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, among others.