“Conveniently Packaged for Your Wasteful Consumption”
A site-specific, collaborative installation
ARTR 346 Relief Printmaking
Please come, visit our large scale, site-specific collaborative art installation by Relief Printmaking class. It comprised of over 400 woodcut prints. Take-away prints will be available from our “vending” machine for your donation to a local non-profit, McKenzie River Trust. We hope this project to bring awareness to a huge trash problems in the ocean effecting marine life. It relates to the current exhibit, “Plastic Entanglement” at JSMA.
“Conveniently packaged for your wasteful consumption”
A site-specific, collaborative installation
ARTR 346 Relief Printmaking
Project Statement
Our collaborative installation is comprised of over 400 hand-carved woodcut prints depicting various items of trash such as plastic bottles, food packaging and wrappers, along with diverse sea creatures. Our intention is to bring awareness to our detrimental trash problem and its effect on marine life.
Our consumerism-driven society driven has made convenience our priority, but at what cost to Earth? Is it truly worth disrupting the delicate balance of the ecosystem? Our project addresses questions raised by the current exhibit, “Plastic Entanglement” at JSMA as well as a lecture by one of the selected artists, Dianna Cohen who leads a non-profit called Plastic Pollution Coalition.
Our “vending machine” appears to sell prints of beautiful sea creatures. However, what the viewer might get is one of the trash-themed prints, just as a fisherman might wind up with a chunk of garbage instead of catching any fish. According to Plastic Pollution Coalition, the oceans will contain more plastic per pound than fish by 2050. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of floating trash halfway between Hawaii and California, has now grown to more than 600,000 square miles; that’s twice the size of Texas. We need to approach the problem with a sense of urgency to act now.
All the money deposited into the vending machine for the take-away prints will be donated to the local non-profit called McKenzie River Trust that focuses on environmental justice; they use 90% of all the money that they raise for land protection, land stewardship and public outreach. Clean protected river water running through conserved land with native species eventually reaches the ocean. Everything is connected.
Printmaking media has been a vehicle for social change and democracy. The methodology of producing multiples, particular to printing, has been widely utilized for spreading ideas and building community. As a class this term, we have been critically investigating how value is determined and what makes things worth sharing, telling and doing. This collaborative project stems from something that matters to us collectively.
Tiara Adams, Anna Baldwin, Maddie Banta, Izzy Cho, Lily Cronn, Reid Ellingson, Amanda Fang, Cheyenne Jaques, Wangqiang Lin, Allie McPheeters, Clancy O’Connor, Alex Perrin, Grace Peccia Stayner, Macon Sumpter, Anna Warnecke, Hongyu Yu
Instructor: Mika Aono Boyd
