sea states
“Sea state” is the general condition of the free surface on a large body of water with respect to wind, waves, and swell at a certain location and moment.
Growing up in West Los Angeles, the ocean stood beyond the city as both the great open frontier, the unfathomable, and as an anchor rooting me to where I was on land and in which direction I was heading. Always knowing where west was, I never feared finding my way home.
I’ve been fascinated by the repetitive and graphic nature of the ocean swells and have always associated wild tracts of sea and land with longing. When my eye travels to a distant horizon, there is a longing for that which is just beyond reach, for something ever beyond reach, ever just slightly incomprehensible. The horizon becomes a signifier of desire, of making me forever midway, reaching,
Didier Maleuvre in his book The Horizon: A History of Our Infinite Longing wrote: “geographic emptiness imparts something crushingly out of scale, imperial, inhuman. It is as good an intimation of a universal, abstract god as a natural habitat can give.”
In retrospect I realize the sea is also an image of transition, lying between there and here, and became for me, the first hint in exploring the displacement story of my immigrant parents.
A selection from the Sea States series coalesced into a solo show at Cabrillo Gallery on the Cabrillo College Campus, Aptos, California in 2011.