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SAN FRANCISCO — On their first date about 30 years ago, Richard Lang and Judith Selby went to Kehoe Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore. Lang reached out to grab a piece from the sand. So did Selby. They spoke and discovered that each of them had been collecting plastic for many years and were making it into art.
They are now the artist duo One Beach Plastic, and live near the beach, where they keep a collection of the plastic they’ve gathered over the decades in a barn, sorted by color and type.
Cheryl Haines was the founder of the For-Site Foundation, and asked them to take part in her latest show, Lands EndThe two were ready to respond to the climate crisis. The show has a dramatic location in San Francisco’s Cliff House, on the edge of the Pacific. Haines chose to use every room of the former restaurant and ballroom including the kitchen. That’s where One Beach Plastic has arranged some of the white plastic they’ve collected on plates and steam trays, in an installation titled “for here or to go” (2021).
“For us to have the kitchen was the best thing ever,” Selby said. “We walked in there, and we said, this is us.”
The exhibition features photography, painting and film as well as sculptures and other media by 26 artists and groups from countries such as Pakistan, Italy, Turkey, and Turkey. The kitchen also features art in the coat closet and trash room. These works include Doug Aitken’s “migration (empire)” (2008), a film of North American animals in motel room rooms. It examines the relationship between the wilderness and the things people make. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s “On the Horizon” (2021), an installation of six-foot-tall cylinders filled with sea water, representing coming sea level rise.
Many of the artists featured in the exhibition are inspired by One Beach Plastic’s team. Chester Arnold lives and works on California’s coast in Sonoma, north of San Francisco. His small oil paintings show turbulent seascapes. Scenes from the Age of Heavy SeasThey hang in the corridor from the dining room, displaying boats and ships almost overwhelmed by the raging water. Arnold said he loved Haines’s idea to display them in ornate frames — like paintings of tranquil seas in many oceanside restaurants.
When Andrea Chung, an artist who lives in San Diego, first did her cyanotype, “Sea Change” (2017), she was thinking about invaders, as well as the changing climate. The blue print above the bar shows lionfish that are native to Indian Ocean. Chung claims that tropical fish hunters have been disposing the fish in the Caribbean where they are destroying ecosystems.
“I thought this could be a metaphor for colonialism,” Chung said. “They don’t have any natural predators, and they’re starting to spread. They’re beautiful fish, but they’re extremely poisonous.”
All the artists say living by the coast influences their work — both in seeing climate chaos, as well as the positive effects of being near the ocean. Arnold, who years ago lived in a flood zone in Sausalito — on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where he saw sea levels rising — says he walks by the sea several times a week and finds it exhilarating.
Chung can’t imagine living anywhere landlocked. “There’s something very regenerative about water,” she said. “It’s very healing. It’s like a battery — I just sit in it and recharge.”
It’s a joy to be so near the ocean, shared Selby, where they see wildflowers and peregrine falcons nesting on cliffs above the beach. “I think of us as planetary housekeepers,” she said. “We want to be caretakers of this place we’re so lucky to live in.”
Lands End Through March 27, the program will continue at 1090 Point Lobos Ave. Entry is free and timed.
