LOOZA BottleProject artistic director Margaret Garrington 541.482.8559
LOOZA BottleProject What is LOOZA BottleProject • Fine Art installation with over 380 clear elegantly shaped vessels • Each vessel is filled with something normally thrown away in the garbage stream • Invites thought and conversation about waste • Promotes responsible consumption
• Imaginative and original each vessel gives form to the formless and are amusing, amazing and at times outrageous • Installation is presented in 15 black frame wall boxes 33 inches wide by 36 inches tall each holding 21 bottles LOOZA BottleProject Participatory Nature of LOOZA BottleProject • Rogue Valley artist’s community responds first • Ashland First Friday event presents project idea to art patrons
• Community at large asked to fill empty bottles • PepsiCo donates 140 juice bottles for free distribution • Media involvement helps get the message out • High School art classes ask to participate • Over 100 people creatively fill LOOZA Bottles • Participants include people from 4 to 84 years young LOOZA BottleProject Messages of LOOZA BottleProject • Examines consumption habits
• Initiates thought about consumerism • Promotes recycling and repurposing, and the reduction of waste • Honors iconic product design: the LOOZA bottle • Creates beauty from humble materials • Breaks down the wall between artist and audience showing art can be inclusive • Shows gift of creativity is universal A Short History of LOOZA BottleProject: The project stemmed from admiration of a LOOZA fruit juice bottle. In my mind, the product designer had created something functional and also aesthetic. Because recycling these lovely forms to be crushed somehow felt wrong, they stacked up on my counter one by one. The repeated forms of the empty vessels begged to be filled with something. A tea drinker, the first bottles filled with tea box detritus. The realization came there is a lot of garbage generated by drinking boxed and bagged tea. Using this as a starting point, but with no concrete idea in mind, I simply started filling bottles with one kind of trash that would normally be thrown away. Each bottle ended up highlighting the environmental impact of my consumption. As a result, my buying habits started to change. Friends were intrigued and interested by the growing display. Knowing the types and amount of my own trash was limited, the realization came that with the help of many people and their trash it was possible to envision a large collaborative installation of bottles to be used to promote responsible consumption and recycling. People were asked to buy the juice, clean the bottle, and fill it with one type of thing they would normally throw away.
As the project progressed, other layers of the process were revealed and became as important to me as the recycling message. The gift people gave me was the creativity they put into their bottle. LOOZA bottles became a sort of small scale enclosure canvas. People did not always follow the rules. They started to use combinations of materials and manipulated color, shape, and pattern by cutting and layering and engineering what went into the bottle. Within these confines, major movements in art were being played out: abstraction, minimalism, dadaism, surrealism, pop, and expressionism. The creative spirit of all involved managed to transcend the physical reality of plain old trash. The word continued to spread for help to complete the project. The LOOZAteam easily surpassed the original goal of 200, and in two years produced over 380 bottles, with over 100 contributors. The LOOZA Bottle Project examines consumption habits, initiates thought about consumerism, honors product design, and creates beauty from really simple materials. Margaret Garrington, artist For more information about LOOZA BottleProject see www.margaretgarrington.wordpress.com Or just GOOGLE LOOZA BottleProject for loads of photos Installation Views of LOOZA BottleProject The LOOZA BottleProject layout adjusts for many different configurations
Google LOOZA BottleProject for more photos
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