Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang

Website: http://beachplastic.com/

Statement: Since 1999 Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang as a collaborative team have been visiting Kehoe Beach, Point Reyes National Seashore in Northern California.They have rambled 1000 meters of tideline of this one beach hundreds of times to gather plastic debris washing out of the Pacific Ocean and from this one beach have collected over two tons of material. By carefully collecting and "curating" the bits of plastic, they fashion it into works of art that matter-of-factly show, 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. Many people don’t know about the oil=plastic equation but every year thousands of barrels of oil and natural gas are extracted then used to make plastic. Offshore oil drilling, tanker oil spills, tar balls washed ashore, and plastic, lots of it, are all part of our exposé as we develop an artistic response to the problem of petroleum and plastic pollution. A toy replica of an ATV gas guzzler that washed ashore displayed on top of a pile of black beach plastic from Kehoe Beach is our ah-ha and ta-da. Viewers are encouraged to take a close look and hopefully, discover in the mess of shards and fragments, recognizable objects then ask themselves, could that comb have once been mine? and ponder — what can we do with the wreck of our petroleum-based consumer culture?