Artist and printmaker Andrew Kozlowski spoke at the Memorial Union on Thursday about his artistic influences and how to reduce waste in his lecture “Art and Our Culture of Ephemerality.”

“I realized as an artist that I wanted to tell a story about a world that I saw,” Kozlowski said, “But I never wanted to make it seem like I was ever hammering someone with an overall message.”

Kozlowski said first works of art were influenced by his thoughts about how humans deal with natural disasters.

“The idea of the apocalypse or apocalyptic imagery is sort of throughout our history but it’s been pretty prevalent in contemporary culture too,” Kozlowski said.

Over time, Kozlowski moved on from small portraits of apocalyptic scenarios to larger art pieces. With his installations he wanted to focus on environmental landscapes and how they are treated by humans. Many of his larger art pieces include drawings of plants and furniture combined.

Although Kozlowski appreciated that he was able to create larger artworks, he became troubled when he took the installations apart, there was a lot of waste left behind.

“What am I doing as an artist?” Kozlowski said, “I’ve got a bunch of garbage that I’m trailing behind me.”

Kozlowski said a light bulb went off for him and he began to teach workshops about reusing leftover materials. He showed people how to soak the old paper, shred it and put it in a screen in order to create new paper out of it. Kozlowski said that it was almost full circle for him because because he was able to leave with new pieces of artwork.

Kozlowski also discussed one of his more recent projects titled “Dark Days (Overture).” For every month of 2017, Kozlowski constructed collages based on the most popular news stories that would appear on his facebook, most of which had an overall theme of political justice.

Kozlowski’s lecture is part of the ten-year celebration of Iowa State’s “Live Green!” Initiative. The next speaker is RAYGUN’s Mike Draper, who will be speaking on Oct. 4.