In honor of Champlain College’s Sustainability Month, faculty member Rebecca Schwarz assigned an “Eco-Logic” assignment for her sculpture and public art students.  Try to find them all around campus…

Bring it Back
Ireland building by Aubrie Gillam
Printed and cut digital paintings
These subtle, quiet, and small, but very intentional pieces are designed to make people think. Without direct words or messages I encourage people to develop ideas on their own. How can we incorporate nature into our daily lives? I have placed small ornamented foxes in areas that I feel need more ‘nature;’ places that I think have become too urbanized. How can we as humans bring back nature and its mysticism into our industrial society? Will harmony ever be reached? These foxes represent the beauty that nature can provide – small artworks to break up the industrial monotony. This work is personal, but it also invites the community to add their own thoughts and opinions. This piece also comments on the loss of habitat around the globe for all forms of life; foxes are one of many species that have been affected by this. By bringing the foxes indoors, it symbolizes many species’ loss of habitat and how they have had to turn to urban life for shelter.

Know Your Trash
by Zack Niedzwiecki, posters
Created as a wake up to the campus passer by and designed to be a blunt message of knowing exactly what you’re getting rid of and how you are disposing of it.  Know Your Trash serves as a reminder to look more closely at what’s in your trash and what you should really recycle. My hope is that from this we as a college recycle more and make sure that what we are putting in the trash belongs there.

Fishkill
found in various places on campus by Pete Perry
Fishkill is a multimedia experiment in viral marketing kicked off by a poster with a simple logo and a QR code, distributed around campus. The QR code leads to the site created for Fishkill. This site contains information on the pollution in Lake Champlain and some organizations you can volunteer with or support to aid in the cleanup of the lake.

Kickball
on Champlain’s Black Market Facebook page by Kaylee Pratt
The animated GIF, Kickball, can be found on Champlain’s Black Market Facebook page. This piece focuses on our trained ignorance towards sustainability, due to the concept’s overuse and lack of meaning. Our generation has especially fallen victim to the repetition of this whole “save the world” ideal; we’ve been told about global warming since we were in elementary school. The truth is, no matter how inspirational a piece of art is in light of sustainability, we’ll all continue to be numb to the repetitive topic.

Consumption
in the computer lab basement of Ireland, by Ricky Rizzo, folded papers
For this project, I decided that simplicity was best.  Everything about sustainability asks for a message–that’s how people have come at it for ages now.  They want to make points, repeat mantras, etc.  Sustainability month in particular is about drawing attention to issues by making statements, and I have a statement for you.  What I did was straightforward; I took something that would have been thrown out and reused it.  In this case, I used a single page from a newspaper, and created a series of paper cranes from the decreasing sizes of squares I could cut from it.  The newspaper, found in the Mac Lab in the basement of the Ireland building, was just another piece of detritus from human consumption.  From it, new life, so to speak, has been created.  But what will come of this small installation?  Who can tell.  Perhaps it will meet the same end.

Can the Earth Be Saved?
Library 1^st floor lounge, By Leroy Sylva
We’re reminded to recycle, there are call-to-arms for greater sustainability in our lives, and we’re slowly beginning to adopt more renewable resources while also trying to cut down on depleting the finite resources that are beginning to dry up. Recently, Burlington became the first U.S. city to be powered 100% by renewable energy, and there are other fantastic advances towards greener technology, and saving the Earth. But the question remains: can the Earth truly be saved from certain doom? I pose that question to the general populace and Champlain College community who could respond in about 30 words or less to the question,. Answers are added to the canvas of the piece – a big question mark with the Earth as a dot, signifying how widespread the question could be, perhaps bigger than the planet itself.

The media I’ve used is a mixture of drawing and collaging on a canvas that is made from paper and plastic bags reinforced with paper on the inside with metal staples and plastic tape acting as bonding agents, as well as more paper on the outside where the art is primarily located. Each of the materials used (metal, plastics, paper) are resources that can be considered to be sustainable if recycled. After much consideration, I’ve decided to use the Ireland building’s first floor to display the piece. I chose this primarily due to visibility, and also as a bit of a nod to the Ireland building’s two distinct departments which it houses: the Communications & Creative Media department, and the Stiller School of Business. It’s meant to appeal to the creative types, while also sending a message to those looking for a future in business in regards to how they’ll play their part in sustaining the Earth’s resources.

Plastic Curtain
Location: First floor lobby of Ireland, by Kristin Darling
To understand this piece it is also important to know exactly what it is made of. This piece is made up of the plastic containers collected solely from the recycling the people in my apartment collected for the past two weeks. This is only one household of recycling which goes to show just how much plastic is used if this is only one room of many. The placement of the piece is key as well. This is a place where people hang out during the day so putting it in the center of it all is to show that it isn’t something to be ignored. It is front and center so whenever people are walking by or sitting down they will notice it. A lot of the time people tend to ignore the problems the world faces if it doesn’t directly affect them. By putting this in their way it breaks their normal every day routine and makes them notice something they previously would have ignored.

Stopgap  or Wouldn’t it Be Ice?
Location: Walkway parallel to Stiller off the Aiken Green. By Hannah Marchitell. Natural materials: snow and water (to create glacier like ice) and man-made materials: drain plugs, plastic, and wire.
Stopgap is meant to highlight our inadequate and small attempts at stopping climate change through the ephemeral qualities of ice. The man-made materials serve as mere stopgaps for the inevitable melting of the ice. As the ice melts, more of the inadequate attempts will appear until they alone remain without a remnant of ice.

Cardboard Art
Hauke 2^nd floor hallway, by Brandon Griggs
You can make art out of something so seemingly silly as cardboard. Most people don’t consider it to be worthy of crafting something out of it and so I wanted to show the exact opposite of that. You don’t have to use brand new materials to make your work.

Essentials
Ireland lobby, posters by Sarah Handrahan
I created this piece to work as a series from left to right stressing the downsides of climate change progressively as you read the facts. The topics of coffee, cellphones and water were chosen to hit home for a lot of people and be more relatable than something such as icebergs or weather patterns. By using our essential valuables to target the audience it grabs attention. There is a sense of humor while still stressing the importance of the overall situation.