Ocean Art Walk

After months of planning and hundreds of emails we FINALLY arrived in Hong Kong and were warmly welcomed by Doug Woodring, co-founder of the Ocean Recovery Alliance and organizer of the Hong Kong Ocean Film Festival and the Ocean Art Walk in Stanley Bay, HK. Thanks to Doug we spent an amazing 7 days in Hong Kong where we created and installed a group of artworks that will be on display at Stanley Bay, April 9-23. 

To really know a country the hardware store is THE place. It's where you can find out how people get things done. And in the case of Hong Kong, where there is no Home Depot- it can mean going way off-the-beaten path.  To really know a person you have to have gone the distance with them down narrow alley ways to hardware stores to find the right supplies to get the job done. Doug showed us the way so we are now writing the Lonely Planet Guide to Hardware Stores, HK.

Thanks to an awesome HK Ocean Art Walk team of volunteers who exemplified the famous proverb, Many Hands make light work, we were able to make quick work of over 2500 single-use bottles to create Water Lilies. We couldn't have done it without them. 

Richard Hill captured in time lapse the days of construction and installation. He compressed hours of work into a few short minutes. He made it look so easy.

On the walkway out to Blake's Pier we mounted Plastic Buffet, creating a corridor gallery to showcase our series of prints. Rather than paint or pencil we use shards of plastic as our medium. They become akin to strokes of paint on a palette. 

From the massive girders of  Blake's Pier we hung banners. On one side high-resolution images of plastic were super-imposed on a photograph taken in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in the North Pacific Gyre to symbolize the human impact we are having in even the most remote locations on earth. On the other side we presented our series Full Fathom Five inspired by Jackson Pollock's gigantic drip paintings. We tried to emulate his style using the fibers of fishing net and line. His "all over" composition lends itself to these pieces. Netting is indeed all over the planet's oceans. 

Net Man composed of old fishing nets collected from the fishermen in Aberdeen represents a character from the ocean, who comes out of the water to show his pleasure about the revival of the biodiversity of Hong Kong waters as a result of new controls on overfishing.  As a testimony to the resilience of the ocean, Net Man celebrates the healing forces of nature.

Net Man applauds efforts to bring awareness to the problems of intensive and unmonitored fishing, pollution, trawling, dredging and dumping that have had a negative impact on our marine environment.  He expresses the vision of healthier seas, safeguarding our marine ecology for future generations, by giving the ocean the breathing space needs to come back to life.

We are thrilled to be a part of such a grand endeavor to engage and educate visitors and passersby about the importance of the health of the oceans. We are thrilled to join forces with the other fine artists who contributed to the Ocean Art Walk. The press conference was a huge success with the artists and lots of reporters mixing it up.  South China Morning News posted a report. 

Although it seemed like we did nothing but work, Doug took good care of us, making sure that we enjoyed delicious fare from the sidewalk vendor and the famous Hong Kong hotpot.

And we even had one morning to do a walking tour exploring the shops close by our hotel.

Special thanks to the photographers who contributed to this blog post: Richard Hill, Wilson Tang, Kacie Wong, and Doug Woodring.

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The True Cost of Plastic

As a collaborative team, we have visited Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore hundreds of times to gather plastic debris washing out of the Pacific Ocean. In 2001 we presented our first findings in One Year, One Beach at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station. We never imagined what would happen since that first exhibit, how picking up trash from the beach would become our life work. Since that first show, we have had over 50 exhibitions of our work. From the US Embassy in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia to the stage at Lincoln Center we have had incredible opportunities to show and share our work. Now until December 2013 at The Marine Mammal Center we have a 9' sculpture made from ghost nets taken from the stomach of a sperm whale. Opening June 1 we will have a permanent display in the new Cordell Bank area in the refurbished Natural Sciences at the Oakland Museum of California.

This year Gallery Route One is marking its 30 years dedicated to presenting exhibitions in a professional art space in a rural setting. We are so pleased that they have invited us back to celebrate.

Now some thirteen years later since our first GRO exhibition we are still energized by the task of picking up trash. The stuff keeps washing in and we continue to be challenged to find ways to communicate about the plastic tide. By carefully collecting and "curating" the bits of plastic, we fashion it into works of art that matter-of-factly shows, with minimal artifice, the material as it is. The viewer is often surprised that this colorful stuff is the thermoplastic junk of our throwaway culture. As we have deepened our practice we’ve found, like archeologists, that each tiny bit has a story to tell.

Of late we have turned our attention to a somber bit of plastic jetsam. Through the years we have amassed quite a collection of toy soldiers. Wracked by a long life at sea, some of the faces are gnarled, chewed on, abraded by the sand. When we looked into the tiny faces we were amazed by their expressions. Each soldier is a poignant reminder of the ravages of war and the extremes to which nations will go to preserve dominion over the petrochemical world.

In The True Cost of Plastic we will present large-scale photographs of toy soldiers, a re-enactment of a battle scene, and some of our rare and amazing pieces of plastic collected from Kehoe Beach.

March 22- April  28

Reception Sunday March 24, 3- 5 PM

Salon, Sunday, April 28 4-5 PM

"like" us

To keep up with our beach plastic adventures both on and off the beach "like" beachplastic on Facebook and become our friend.

We are excited to announce that we will be artists in residence at the Rockport Center for the Arts, May 20-25 with a reception May 25. We will be creating a site specific installation from plastic collected from Gulf Coast beaches.

The Ghost Below

Big thanks to Cynthia Abbott and Jill Lessard, the expert video producers who braved the chill weather to interview us at The Marine Mammal Center to help us tell the story of The Ghost Below.

The show airs this week

+     Mon   1/14/13    11:00 AM    Channel 26

+     Tue    1/15/13    10:00 AM    Channel 26

+     Wed   1/16/13    10:00 AM    Channel 26

+     Thu    1/17/13    10:00 AM    Channel 26

Seriously Now is a new weekly progressive television news program at the Community Media Center of Marin in San Rafael. Thanks to Peggy Day, executive producer, they present news that isn't ordinarily available on major channels and is important for people making "real life" decisions in this volatile time. Channel 26, Marin.

Glad Tidings

Glad tidings…from Kehoe Beach

We are sure glad about what transpired this year. We are grateful to the many enthusiastic supporters who helped us spread the word - our beach plastic project has educated and entertained from Kehoe Beach to Zürich, from Monterey to Tbilisi.

Special thanks to the special people who helped our story go far and wide.

We started 2012 with Masterpiece Made of Trash for the Travel Channel series Bizarre Collections.

Mike Leonard from CBS produced Oceans and Art that premiered on the Today show- yes, that TODAY show first-thing-in-the-morning If you missed it live it is now available on Vimeo. 

Via SKYPE we were live on prime time Tokyo WOWOW TV. No, we have not yet found any tsunami plastic but we do find plastic from Japan all of the time.

The Plastic in Question graced the 1^st, 4^th and 5^th floors of the San Francisco Public Library-Main Branch. The library staff was a dream of a team to help us refigure our blog into reader friendly text panels that were perfect for the library going public. 

We were Washed Ashore, the cover story in the summer issue of National Parks magazine. 

One Plastic Beach is the little movie that could. To date it has had quite an Internet presence with 143,100 hits on Vimeo. All year it’s been on the road, traveling throughout the US with Mountainfilm in Telluride and the Wild and Scenic Film Festival.

And thanks to Teknion we have been on the road too. We presented Indra’s Net our power point to workshop participants at the Dallas Museum of Art and the Newseum in Washington D.C. 

Our Kehoe Beach nurdles or "Mermaid's Tears," as they are more poetically named, are included in Out to Sea? that opened at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich (Museum of Design Zurich) and has now moved on to Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg until March 31, 2013

"The Ghost Below" opened December 1 at The Marine Mammal Center. Our looming nine-foot "monster" made from ghost nets and derelict fishing gear from the stomach of a beached sperm whale is the first in a series of exhibitions and events to highlight the problem of marine mammal entanglement. 

June 1, mark your calendar

The Oakland Museum has been under construction for a long time – when the natural science area is completed it will be the first time in five years that all areas of the museum will be open. Plan to visit the art, the history AND the nature on June 1, 2013. You can see our installation The Great Conveyor in the Cordell Bank area.

March 22, mark your calendar

We have of late turned our attention to a somber bit of plastic jetsam. Through the years we have amassed quite a collection of toy soldiers. When we look into their tiny faces we are amazed by their expressions. Wracked by a long life at sea, some of the faces are gnarled, chewed on, abraded by the sand. Each is a poignant reminder of the ravages of war. March 22 – April 28 we will present The True Cost of Plastic at Gallery Route One in Point Reyes Station. 

Seems like Kehoe Beach is not going to be plastic-free anytime soon so until then we will be doing our best to do something about it. Our most important effort is stemming the tide. Stopping the plastic before it even gets to the beach. Re-thinking everything, every piece of plastic we use and asking ourselves- do we need this?

Indra's Net

In preparation for the grand reopening of the natural sciences galleries at the Oakland Museum next June we presented our PowerPoint, Indra's Net to the docents and staff.

Indra in Hindu mythology lays an infinite net over the universe where at every juncture a jewel hangs reflecting all other jewels.

Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore is our jewel on the net. Since 1999 we have focused our efforts on a single point, on just 1000 yards of beach. We have cast Kehoe Beach as the stage for a drama that explores ideas of (dare we say it without irony in this postmodern world?) love and beauty. This pinpoint of land is an exemplar of the planetary problem of plastic pollution and the site of our ongoing investigation of geology, botany, biology, along with the history and development of polymers and plastic. One interest leading to another to another as a perfect example of how everything is connected to everything else.

The creative process is at the core of how we think and what we do. In our presentations we incorporate jokes and poetry and great visuals. For the art docents we spoke about our some 40 years of experience as studio artists and the aesthetic influences that shaped our Cordell Bank installation. For the history docents we told stories about some of the individual pieces of plastic we have found and how we discover their origins. For the natural science docents we talked about Kehoe Beach and its proximity to Cordell Bank.

The docents appreciated our talk/slideshow and afterwards we got to take a look at our plastic display. We had not seen the install completed. We are going to add a few more bottle islands to the ceiling making a better connection between the table-top display and the ceiling and have to add a few more stories to the booklets. But all and all we are THRILLED!!!

The Oakland Museum has been under construction for a long time – when the natural science area is completed It will be the first time in five years that all areas of the museum will be open. Plan to visit the art, the history AND the nature on June 1, 2013.

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The Ghost Net Monster

It was such an auspicious beginning — the ghost net monster animated by the wind whipping the nets was better than we could have imagined.Then watching visitors to The Marine Mammal Center do the attraction/repulsion dance as they were intrigued and then horrified — and yes, that undeniable smell of whale.

In our early years, after our grad school training in post-modern art theory it was the esoteric and difficult that seemed important. Since we began our beach plastic project we have turned the tide and have sought venues where art could have a wider impact. Our work has gone well outside the confines of the traditional gallery/museum, white-walls spaces. We've been heartened to see our work on the back of busses, at the US Embassy in Tbilisi, at the San Francisco Public Library, in the bathrooms of an upscale resort hotel. The world outside the accustomed is where we want to be. We love visiting the ivory towers of culture, but to see our work at the TMMC feels totally right, and we happy to be a part of the TMMC's mission to include art as part of the program.

Why art in a hospital? TMMC is a special place for healing, not only for the marine mammals who are patients but also for the visitors, volunteers, and staff.

We believe that if art that can hold the gaze of the viewer long enough to interrupt the mind-numbing drone heard daily regarding the dire state of the planet, it can have a positive healing and life-affirming effect.

Hey, we too are marine mammals and we are glad to have that special TMMC healing energy coming our way.

Thanks to Michael Hanrahan for his comprehensive report about “The Ghost Below” for the Mill Valley Patch. 

That’s Alex Treu, fabricator, Judith Lang, artist, Richard Lang, artist and Anne Veh, curator in the photograph.