Zero Waste UGA Film Screening: The Cigarette Surfboard
Wednesday, April 23 from 5 to 7:30 PM
Cine, 234 W. Hancock Ave.
Join Zero Waste UGA for a free screening of The Cigarette Surfboard and panel discussion with the filmmaker in a conversation about ocean stewardship and strategies to reduce single use plastics. The evening will include Regarding the Discarded, a temporary exhibition of art that engages material reuse and reduction.
https://www.thecigarettesurfboard.com
After a young designer realizes that a surfboard – which he crafted from thousands of littered cigarette butts picked up off California beaches – could captivate the eyes of millions across the globe, he decides to use it as the impetus to do something more. The Cigarette Surfboards become a platform to spark ocean stewardship and the symbol of a campaign to hold Big Tobacco accountable for their toxic, plastic waste. Surfing is the medium, but the message is universal.
Zero Waste UGA is an interdisciplinary experiential learning initiative to foster a culture of sustainability through waste reduction. The UGA campus will function as a living laboratory to support teaching, research, service and outreach, student engagement, and operational innovations toward a circular economy.
Event sponsors: UGA Office of Sustainability, UGA Sustainability Certificate, UGA Marine Extension / Sea Grant, UGA Arts Collaborative, UGA Department of Anthropology.
Panel
Ben Judkins, Filmmaker
Taylor Lane, Ciggy Board Creator
Dr. Pete Brosius, Distinguished Research Professor, UGA Department of Anthropology
Kathryn Youngblood, Senior Research Engineer, UGA Circularity Informatics Lab
Jeanne Marie Martineau, MFA student
Kevin Kirsche, Director of UGA Office of Sustainability (Moderator)
Regarding the Discarded
Group exhibition featuring the work of MFA students in the Lamar Dodd School of Art, curated by Jeanne Marie Martineau.
Caitlin La Dolce is an interdisciplinary artist and educator originally from the Northeast Kingdom region of Vermont. Through material interaction and transformation, their work explores the themes of ritual, decay, illness, and time.
I embrace formal elements of fragility and material hybridization to examine patterns of growth and reference the interdependence and interaction between humans, non-humans, and non-living matter. I am interested in using the practice of making objects as a method for showing an intertwining story of bodies and materials. To this end, I transform and blend materials to create textured webs that speak to cycles of time and the illusory immutability of borders.
Larissa McPherson is a metalsmith and jewelry artist from Adairsville, GA.
My work explores ideas and issues related to the accumulation of microplastics and waste in the environment, specifically in animal bodies. Designed to reside on and interact with the human body, the jewelry I create serves as a tool to bridge the plastic invasion of non-human bodies with the parallel invasion occurring within human bodies.
Born and raised in the rural desert valleys of central Utah, interdisciplinary artist Adah Lee Bennion engages processes of traditional craft and fiber to form intimate and explorative relationships with materials over protracted lengths of dedicated time and intention, through which she explores interweaving threads of time, materiality, memory and value as they intersect with and within our contemporary context. Bennion received her BFA in Sculpture Intermedia from the University of Utah and she is currently an Arts Lab Research Fellow.
Compelled by the resourcefulness that comes from limitation, Bennion works almost exclusively with non-new materials: the discarded, jettisoned, and forgotten; items with which our landscape is bursting at the seams. Dismantling these by hand, she slowly becomes acquainted with the tendencies, preferences, and character of each, manually engaging refuse with intention as a practice of preservation and dissidence – carrying on the bodily traditions and rituals of craft in defiance of a culture obsessed with immediacy, convenience, and scrolling. Working with a media fluidity, Bennion’s work blurs the lines between craft and contemporary sculpture, subtly seeking to corrupt the loadbearing columns upholding our inherited hierarchies of value while dismantling notions of “women’s work.”
Gabrielle Gagné is a queer French-Canadian papermaker, sculptor, and installation artist. Inspired by nature and community, they work using foraged and gleaned fibers including invasive species, agricultural compost, and trash. Through their work and social practice they explore the emotional relationship between humans and their lived environment.
Jeanne Marie Martineau is a French-American transdisciplinary artist who weaves various mediums of object making, dream tending, writing, song, and sound meditation into a unified peace practice and experiences of artistic self-discovery for others. As an urban alchemist, Jeanne Marie reincarnates found plastic waste into adornment and ritual objects. Starting with the personal, she follows romance and engages with imaginal realms, translating her own spiritual practices into works and group experiences that aim to expand capacity for love and acceptance.
Polyethylene is the most widely used and least recycled* plastic in the world and this “non recyclable” waste has seduced me into transforming it into jewelry. Collecting every scrap, chasing bags down the street I have gotten to know it intimately. I imagine that Polyethylene is dreaming through me. I’m just here to listen – a medium helping it realize its wildest (and most luxurious!) dreams… It became so clear: of course a material that is treated as cheap trash would dream of being treated as the most precious object known to humanity: jewelry. In “From Fossil to Fossil” I imagine that plastic has dreamed itself back into fossil form.
*in its “film” form
