From Here to Eternity - Show info
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| Nurdles and Rubber Duckie on California Beach. |
From Here To Eternity
This show explores the silent drama of our plastic world. A global story revealed through three intrepid artists on Stinson and Kehoe beach. We could have also titled this show, Nurdle Alert. Nurdles are the tiny preproduction plastic pellets that float from here to eternity in the belly's of birds, babes, and fish, and cover once pristine beaches around the world. The playful art of the artists in this show illustrates our need to address the dangers and disasters of plastic. The artists in this show have used beach findings of everyday trash as a medium to create their work. The resulting works help clarify a singular environmental message, plastic is damaging our environment and the health of our marine life and in turn our lives. These artists bring home a strong message to all of us through what is truly composed of fine art, one of our most powerful political addresses. A wreath of washed-up forks is an olive branch of hope. The artists demonstrate how this flotsam is indeed a part of our daily food chain. We can each begin to protect our natural environment and all living organisms by using less plastic or at least be inspired to make art out of that which we have used. Enjoy the Show! - Daisy Carlson (Curator)
Special thanks to the contributing artists as well as to Daisy Carlson for curating the show, Lucy Mercer whose vision of community keeps 142 Throckmorton Theater alive, Whole Foods Mill Valley for their financial support and to Gordon Edwards who installed this show.
Show Events
Official show opening Tuesday, June 7th
5:00 to 7:00 PM.
A special event, organized in conjunction with this show, come explore the
Marine Mammal Center
June 25
All-day viewing of art, and tours of the marine mammal center with old fashion games and events. Get a sneak preview of exciting sculptures, make some art, after combing the beach for “art supplies” enjoy a picnic
sponsored by Whole Foods.
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| Beach Plastic Portrait by Tess Felix |
Our bodies our plastic! In the front room, you will find several marine debris portraits by Tess Felix that illustrate that we are what we produce. That "Away" place we throw our garbage to is ending up being back in the food chain, in animals, and in turn in our bodies. These Portraits in plastic are about becoming our debris. I discovered Tess Felix's work while preparing to mount this show at the Whole Foods creative Reuse contest and had to make room for it. This is Tess's first major show of this exciting body of work. She has artfully illustrated that marine debris not only has extremely harmful consequences for wildlife and ecosystems it damages our health as it enters the food chain. The irony of these portraits clarified the message put forth in the rest of the show. I am so happy to be able to share these wonderful works with you. I hope we all leave the gallery with the commitment to use less single-use plastic in our lives.
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| Beach Plastic Portrait by Tess Felix Tess Felix, A painter from Stinson Beach, California was inspired to make this work after a big storm in February 2010 washed tons of plastic garbage out of the Sacramento Delta and flooded the shores of Stinson Beach with colorful fragments of plastic. The sight of it was shocking to her. She said, “ The beach looked like a mosaic. I picked up some garbage that day, went home, and made a portrait out of the plastic. I returned the portrait to a little shack on the beach as a gift back to the sea. Someone found it and took it home, so I made another one. This is how the plastic debris portraits came to be. Fortunately, while the garbage on the beach reminded me that we consumers are destroying our environment, I also saw shapes, color, and the potential to create something positive. I wanted to give order and meaning to it.”Felix’s portraits are magnificent in both her mastery of painterly style as well as her ironic genius, which reminds us that these plastics seep into the food stream and return as toxins into our bodies. |
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| Beach Plastic Photo Montage by Judith Selby and Richard Lang |
Judith Selby-Lang and Richard Lang have been visiting 1000 yards of a remote beach in the Point Reyes National Sea Shore since 1999. They have rambled this one beach hundreds of times to gather plastic debris washing out of the Pacific Ocean. By carefully collecting and "curating" the bits of plastic, they fashion it into works of art— 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 paleontologists, each bit of plastic opens into a pinpoint look at the whole of human culture. Each bit has a story to tell." They have had over 40 exhibitions ranging from the SFMOMA to the US Embassy in the Republic of Georgia. Although our work speaks about a real environmental problem, art is the central theme. This multifaceted exploration is also a two-part love story. The love of a place in a magnificent national park just 25 miles from San Francisco, a major American megalopolis. This beach is also the sight of our first date opening to an ongoing marriage of two souls dedicated to the notion that beauty can contribute to righting a world out of balance.
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| Can top Dress |
Trash Couture throughout the gallery by Elise Cheval, Susan Kelly, Jen Byrne, and Christine Culver was selected by the curator in recognition for their couture creations entered into the Whole Foods Creative Reuse contest. Each has expanded our sense of style with these wonderful up-cycled pieces. Some very creative up-cyclers have fashioned banners, packaging and can tab into delightful fashions that truly make a statement. Each of these artists entered into the Whole Foods Creative Reuse contest and the winners won $1000 from Whole Foods for their favorite charity. My love seat didn't win my prize was discovering many creative works to share with you. I selected these to illustrate, we don't only have to eat our trash we can wear it too.
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| Nurdles on the beach with a coin. |
Nurdle Alert! In the front room you will find large images of tiny Nurdles, sometimes referred to as “mermaid’s tears,” they are almost impossible to see until one learns what they are and how to differentiate them from a piece of shell or a fish egg. Once recognized, you see numbers of them scattered across the sand. Nurdles, pre-production polypropylene resin pellets, are the raw plastic material that is shipped to manufacturers of bottles, car parts, toys, almost anything made of plastic. They are a particularly noxious component of the plastic flotsam. Because they are chemically “open,” they are magnets for metabolites, PCB's, breakdown products of DDT—DDE and other dioxin-like substances. They are poisonous little bombs loaded with tens of 1000's of times more poison than the ambient sea, and because they are translucent they are mistaken for fish eggs and enter the food chain. With this, and all our projects our intention is to make something splendid out of something troublesome; to focus on our indiscriminate use of plastics.
