Washed Up

Hey, I wanted to post my friend Alejandro Durán's project WASHED UP, which is a meditation on nature and culture. Below is his description of the project from his site:
http://www.alejandroduran.com/projects/washed-up/


With the Caribbean shores of the Yucatán peninsula as my studio, and the plastic garbage carried there by ocean currents from all parts of the globe as my material, WASHED UP is my attempt to turn trash into treasure.
After my initial disgust at the sheer quantity of garbage littering the beaches of Sian Ka’an, Mexico’s first federally protected biosphere, I wondered what I could do with these materials and how I could alchemize this ugliness. I collected bags and bags of trash that had floated in from thirty-nine nations on five continents, which I then transformed into site-specific sculptures.
Working in response to the landscape and within a highly defined color palette, I sought to create arrangements that look simultaneously natural and artificial. While inspired by the work of Andy Goldsworthy and Robert Smithson, WASHED UP is intended as something new that speaks to our time and its vast quantity of discarded materials.