When we installed our Chroma Blue at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek it was almost a year to the day (1/22/19) when Ann Trinca, freelance curator, first reached out to us about a show she was proposing that was going to be inspired by the The Great Wave, a woodblock print by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai. She intended that the exhibition look at the power and fragility of our oceans with a section of art made from beach plastics and she was inviting us to participate.
After Ann’s studio visit and our trip to the Bedford, there numerous emails back and forth and forth and back. Several arrangements were envisioned — complicated and dense. We all agreed that given the theme that we bring out the blue. There was lots of sorting and setting the stage with our fine collection of international bottles. So on our appointed install day (1/6/20) we were ready-set with a car full of possibilities
We like to say we work well with others and this day was exemplary. One of the great pleasures is our collaboration — the lively banter with just us and then we appreciate when our circle is expanded to include Electric Works with daughter-in-law Kris Lang who printed our Chroma Blue (big and on canvas), Ann Trinca who held the curatorial vision, the parameters and challenges of the space (curved walls) and the crackerjack installers Erik Mortensen and Jeff Cowherd. Given this expert team, we trusted that although we had decided on a plan, our display might take a turn and surprise us by ending up somewhere we had not imagined.
Once the shelves were mounted and Chroma Blue was hung, we piled everyday objects (in blue) on the sweep of shelf. Along with the thermoplastic junk of our throwaway culture, we tossed a selection of international single-use bottles from Korea, Japan, China and Malaysia to show how the ocean currents are the great conveyors bringing debris from all around the Pacific Rim to us on Kehoe Beach. As brackets for the ensemble we hung our photographs of blue nurdles. Nurdles or pre-production pellets are the result of the fractionating process of forming hydrocarbons into easily shipped bits; in this case they were colored blue before being made into bottles, bins, or bags.
Voilà — we might now call this installation Rhapsody in Blue or maybe taking a cue from Wallace Stevens The Man with the Blue Guitar Canto XXXII
Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.
How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,
Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand
Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.
You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.
We were surpised with the final result and we hope that visitors to the Bedford will be also be surprised and will find beauty in our blues.
Bedford Gallery at the Lesher Center for the Arts
1601 Civic Dr. Walnut Creek, CA 94596
January 12- March 22, 2020
