Eco Gift Boxes
Gift boxes, paintings, photos
Manchester, NH
2004

Manchester Union Leader

Environmental Artist Tim Gaudreau to Lead Project for Studio Art Students
  
Tuesday, October 5, 2004

CHESTER, NH – Maybe you’ll find one. They’ll be distributed around downtown Manchester on October 12. And they have a message worth listening to.

No, we’re not talking about the latest CD release. Rather, what’s being distributed are small Eco Gift Boxes, the outcome of a collaborative effort between Chester College of New England Studio Art Professor Jennifer Benn, her students in a modern day Landscape Painting class, and environmental artist Tim Gaudreau.

Professor Benn proposed the project as a component of the Landscape class she is teaching this semester. While the project will explore basic artistic issues such as craft, composition, and collaboration, its underlying concept explores issues such as artists’ social responsibility, art as activism and its ability to raise questions. The project is intended to explore art within an Eco-art context as a subversive and alternative way of presenting ideas to audiences.

On Tuesday, October 12, students will be in downtown Manchester handing out or covertly placing Eco Gift Boxes containing work they created during class. The artists hope to raise curiosity by publicly placing work wrapped as precious gifts. As passers-by pick up or accept the gifts, the work inspires consideration of nature, our surrounding ecosystem and environmental issues. For the students, the project is a lesson in collaboration and the role of art as social commentary.

Mr.Gaudreau’s participation in this class project stems from his belief that “artists have considerable responsibility as cultural instigators to ask questions, raise issues, and challenge assumptions.’ He believes artists can and should use their work and their voice to address our cultural (dis)connection from Nature in order that we may reconsider our relationship to land and resources.

Students assembling the project:

Project Statement:

ECO Gift Boxes

These gift boxes represent a collaboration with students at the Chester College of New England in the fall.  I composed a project that was meant to first challenge students’ perspectives of art, activism and landscape while also acting as a mechanism to raise environmental awareness within community.  I prompted the students to create a diptych about their interpretation of Nature and what they consider important, an image of pure versus an image of developed.

With the boxes in hand, I led students through downtown Manchester giving out boxes to random strangers.  Some boxes we left on store shelves, doorways or cubbies for people to find on their own terms.  I was particularly interested in exploring interaction between strangers post 9/11.  How do we engage strangers on the street today?  How do we receive something unknown?

 

Each box also contained the following statement:

Our surrounding landscape, hidden by pavement, architecture and highway, still looms in the distance.

We cannot escape our need for air and water, sun and earth, nor should we try.   We are inextricably connected to Nature; we cannot live without the birds or the fish or the trees.   This offering is a talisman lest we forget that Nature is precious.   Our development must be tempered, so that the air and water do not poison and the sun and earth do not burn.  

Examples of the included images with a yin & yang of nature
versus adulteration:

    

Students distributing the Eco Gift Boxes to strangers on the street: