Here is the Sea

From the gallery statement:

"Here is the Sea brings together artworks that use the ocean and its coasts as a site for investigating the fraught relationship between humans and nature. Richmond is a city with thirty-two miles of shoreline, and through this exhibition visitors to the Richmond Art Center are invited to reflect on what is at stake and what has already been lost in our local maritime environment. The exhibition presents a range of environmental work, from political pieces with critical messages for social action, to works exploring more subtle, personal impulses that shape our relationship to water.

Artists: Stephen Bruce, Christy Chan, Tanja Geis, Marie-Luise Klotz, Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang, Love the Bulb Performers, Katie Revilla, Jos Sances, Dimitra Skandali"

Curator Amy Spencer was brilliant in her selection of artists and her arrangement of the exhibition space. On the wall that spans one side of the gallery is Jos Sances masterwork The Whale and just opposite on a free-free-standing black wall are three of our photographs of single nurdles each floating in a sea of rich black. With his to-scale scratch-board drawing of one of the largest creatures in the ocean and our enlargements 300x of the smallest pieces of plastic in the ocean, the compare and contrast are extreme.

Thanks to Noah and Kris Lang at Electric Works for their expert digital imaging and printing who made our grain of sand BB-sized nurdles look awesome at 32” x 32”.

Talk about apocalyptic sublime — the pesky poisonous pre-production plastic pellets look sooo beautiful. The luminous sheen of the nurdles floating in the thick saturation of the black on black background. 

Our photographs are titled:

Oma # I Oma #II and Golden Seven

“Oma” (grandmother) and “Opa” (grandfather) are used as pet names for grandmother or grandfather in Germany, Estonia, the Netherlands.

-oma. A suffix meaning “tumor” or “cancer,” as in carcinoma. Often, the suffix is added to the name of the affected body part, as in lymphoma, sarcoma, carcinoma.

“word-forming element, from Greek -oma , with lengthened stem vowel + -ma , suffix forming neuter nouns and nouns that indicate result of verbal action (equivalent of Latin -men ); especially taken in medical use as "morbid growth, tumor.”

With OMA as the title for our nurdle photos we are combining two different (sweet and sour) and seemingly disparate uses of the word. Nurdles are the ur-source, the grandmother, of all manufactured items made from plastic and they are one of the most pernicious, cancerous pieces of plastic in the ocean.

To show nurdles actual size, two gold rings with nurdles replacing the diamonds and a scatter of nurdles are presented like rare jewels. Lest we forget:

Like diamonds, plastic is forever….

In the entry way corridor our banner No Room for Sand greets visitors to the exhibition:

Here is a blog post about nurdles

http://plasticforever.blogspot.com/p/nurdles.html

Here is a blog post about beach plastic jewelry

http://beachplasticjewelry.blogspot.com/2014/10/like-diamonds-plastic-is-forever.html

UPDATE: May 9, 2019
So much great press with much praise for Here is the Sea
http://richmondartcenter.org/announcements/spring-exhibitions-press/