Arts & Life, Fine & Performing Arts

CSULB student gallery adds a dirty angle to photography

Diapers, condoms, cigarettes—items you can find not only at your nearest convenient store but also on the shores of some of the mostly frequently visited beaches in Southern California like Sunset, Newport and Horney Corner Beach.

California State University, Long Beach BFA senior photography major Merissa Mendez focused her photography installation around debris found while cleaning up local beaches.

CSULB BFA student Marissa Mendez shared a QR scan code linked directly to her “SeaTrashGo” Instagram page.
Trang Le | Daily 49er
CSULB BFA student Marissa Mendez shared a QR scan code linked directly to her “SeaTrashGo” Instagram page.

Mendez’s past artwork always had to do with landscape, but her latest idea came after a visit to Seal Beach. However, she found inspiration for her current installation in something unexpected.

“I had been walking around Seal Beach one day just looking for inspiration and saw an overload of trash, and it was so bad that fishes were jumping out of the water,” Mendez said.

Once Mendez started to pick up the trash, she captured the attention of a passerby, who then also volunteered to help her out.

“I went to several different beaches—altogether I went to 13 for an hour. I would pick up at each of those beaches, sometimes I’d invite friends to come with me,” said Mendez. “We would clean up and afterwards I would keep all the trash and document it so that people could see the difference you can make in as little time as an hour.”

The photographs of Mendez’s student art installation “SeaTrashGo” captured the sun-glistened sand and the blue-to-white ombre color effect of the ocean waves, which would typically be a pleasant image, if it weren’t for the dirty side Mendez uncovered with an hour’s worth of collected trashed arrayed right in the dead center of the image.

“It’s sad that these are our beaches now,” said Jose Sanchez, a psychology major who visited the exhibit. “Nothing ruins a perfect day at the beach more than the piles of trash we typically see.”

Trash is a common sight for beach goers whether it be a water bottle or food wrapping here or there, but with closer attention more interesting findings are also in sight.
“When people think of trash on the beach they just think little pieces of plastic or small things, which is still very bad, but as you can see in the photos I found some very strange things,” said Mendez.

Some of those strange things included old socks, used condoms and even partial traces of bras.

Mendez took her findings to social media in hopes of aspiring others to join in the environmental clean up movement, starting a page on Instagram, sharing her photographs and creating the hashtag #SeaTrashGo.

“People assume that somebody else is going to do the work for them. When I was walking around people were making comments to me like ‘Are you picking up for community service?’ Mendez said. “But I was doing it because it was messy. It needed to be picked up. Several people made comments saying that there’s people that do that already, but we are the people that do that.”

The CSULB School of Art displays student galleries in Fine Arts buildings 2-4, with new exhibits each week. Mendez’s “SeaTrashGo” exhibit can be experienced from 12 to 5 p.m. on Tuesday and Thursday, and from 12 to 7 p.m. on Wednesday.

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