Contemporary artists express their relationships with the ocean and the threats it faces

Inspiration for conservation efforts tends to be expressed as a love for the nature the movements try to protect. But there are a multitude of emotions evoked by the powerful forces of nature that lead to the urge to protect it. 

The Great Wave exhibit is currently presented in Dowd Hall by Santa Clara’s Department of Art and Art History. It aims to emulate the human response to the oceanic power displayed in Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa. “We know so little about the ocean still, and what lies below, and how we are to live with it and cope with it,” said curator Ann Trinca. 

The traveling exhibit explores those deep feelings the ocean elicits. Thirteen artists are featured in The Great Wave. Three of them attended the reception on Friday, October 7th to present their works. 

Emphasizing the magic and tragedy of the natural world, artist Liz Hickok incorporated technology and warped perspective into her work. Inundation, a piece with an augmented reality aspect, allows viewers to immerse themselves in a flooding cityscape, while Signal to Noise surreally depicts the powerlines of a flooded city. For these works, Hickok photographed miniature environments she created with crystals grown from mono-ammonium phosphate. 

Through a distortion of scale, Hickok’s beautifully manufactured structures and perspectives immerse the viewer in a scene overtaken by the ocean. Her unique uses of technology and material showcase the juxtaposition between the wonder and power that the natural world possesses.

“It allows for play and whimsy, and we all need that, I think,” said Hickock. “I love color, I love light, I love that I’m using this childhood material that’s meant for kids to learn about crystals, and talking about something a little bit more serious along with it.” 

There’s a deeper purpose to the whimsy of her process, though. Hickok stated, “this crystal solution creates these gorgeous structures that catch light and evoke a geology that might have existed for centuries without us knowing about it. The crystals that grow really evoke a sense of fragility. We think of our environment as being fairly stable and consistent but deep down we know – it’s very temporal, it’s constantly changing.” 

Taking a different route, featured artist Angela Willets placed her moveable self within an immovable environment. Prepositions is a video of the artist fitting herself into and around coastal rocks.

The inspiration for Prepositions came from the want to provide an antithesis to sculptor Richard Serra’s 1967 Verb List, which describes all the things a person can do to a material. Willets said, “When I read it, it felt very aggressive, and very masculine and dominating. I was trying to think of another part of language… What about prepositions? They seem to fit because they’re about the relationship between one thing and another. I wasn’t making anything, I wasn’t changing anything.”

Willets’s work in general focuses around her physical interactions with the world around her. The artist’s statement on her website reads, “Physical dialogues emerge as I probe the boundaries between self and Everything Else in a hungry attempt to collapse the distance between us. It is always a struggle, and I generally fail. But the desire for Entanglement persists.” 

Prepositions allows the viewer an intimate insight into this dialogue. She noted that there was an emotional component to the creation of the piece.

“There was a lot of frustration, for example, because I’m dealing with a material that doesn’t move. I’m squishy, nerves everywhere, my skin will tear. Those rocks were actually pretty jagged,” Willets said. “So there’s a sort of brutality – having to reckon with the surface of the stone and my surface against its surface… It’s not like a deep love for the thing, it’s like, ‘How do I negotiate this?’ ‘How do we exist together?’ ‘How do I yield to it?’ ‘How do I listen?’ and ‘How do I open?’”

Richard and Judith Lang, conservationists as well as artists, similarly demonstrated the necessity of respecting, yielding to and coexisting with the natural world. Describing their mission, Richard Lang said, “What we think about is trying to have the most impact with the least amount of intervention.”

Their piece, titled Remnant, places the viewer directly under a floating ‘ghost net,’ a discarded fishing net that poses threats to marine life. “Placement is everything,” said Richard Lang. The piece is positioned to mimic the appearance of the net as it moves underwater. Looking at the net from below, the viewer is shown the petrifying experience of the moments before entanglement. 

Despite its imposing presence, Remnant represents a miniscule portion of the man-made waste that has ended up in the ocean. “The thing that’s most important is to demonstrate the amount. All of our work is about amount,” Richard Lang emphasized. “That’s the thing, is that we don’t think about these things.”

The dedication the couple has to conservation is clear. At the exhibit’s reception, Richard Lang sported a button-up shirt with a jellyfish pattern and Judith Lang wore a necklace and bracelet made of pieces of flip-flops the two found while beachcombing. 

All of their art, including Remnant, is collected from the beach they have been keeping clean for over twenty years – where the two had their first date. “This is a love story,” said Richard Lang. Judith Lang added, “It’s also a love story about a place… a devotion and passion for a place.”

Richard Lang summarized the message of conservation the two hope to convey, saying, “You’re not going to be able to do everything. But you’re obligated to do something.”