Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang collaborate in an ongoing project to collect plastic that is washing ashore on Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Since 1999 they have focused their attention on just 1000 meters of tide line on a single beach.
Their artwork has been featured in over 70 exhibitions in galleries and museums; educational and science centers including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Artist Windows, the United Nations World Environment Day, the Cummings Gallery at Stanford University, and the University of San Francisco. Their work was recently exhibited at the California Academy of Sciences, Sausalito's Marine Mammal Center, The Oakland Museum, Hong Kong's Ocean Film Festival.
"We have rambled this one remote beach hundreds of times to gather plastic debris washing out of the Pacific Ocean. By carefully collecting and "curating" the bits of plastic, we 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 archeologists, that each bit of what we find opens into a pinpoint look at the whole of human culture. Each bit has a story to tell."
- Judith and richard
Unaccountable procilvities , dimensions varies, 2011, Arhival pigment print on Moab Entrada fine art paper. Image of plastic trash on fiesta ware plates
Chromas, dimensions varies, 2011, Arhival pigment print on Moab Entrada fine art paper. Image of plastic trash arranged in chromatic colours.
" As we sift through our collection of plastic from 1000 yards of beach the first differentiation is by color. 40-some years ago, during our college years, the pedagogic pattern in most art schools, came from the Bauhaus. Johannes Itten (1888-1967) was an instructor at the Bauhaus school and was famous for his treatise on color, The Art of Color. His great question "What color is it?" sparks our reverie as we glean plastic from the beach. What green is it — olive, forest, mantis, teal? What blue — baby, navy, cobalt, ultramarine? Color exists in context and is influenced by what color it is next to. The question of "What color is it?" is often asked of us. We answer, "Red, yes, but which red: purple-red, orange-red, light red (pink)." So we've tried to answer the question with this series of photographs titled Chromas. The colors are just as we find them. Simple pieces of color put together in a considered way are the basis of how we go about our work. Colors are like musical tones, keys on a keyboard and when placed compositionally together become like a song."
- Judith and richard
Source: http://beachplastic.com/Chromas
The artist's works exploits the bright and unnatural hues of plastics, which informs a big part of its identity. Playing with the arrangement of the colours, they created visually engaging pieces of works and photographed them. Introducing slight sense of humour at the same time.
