Washed Up Objects

Washed up. Tide, debris, or the strange feeling of being past usefulness. While developing Backdoor Rebel Routes for Bad Girls for the Intersections program at 18th Street Arts Center, we started mapping the shoreline between the Palisades and Marina del Rey. We collected fragments left behind: driftwood, bones, toys, tiny pieces of someone else drifting in.

Maybe it was the constellations of objects we glimpsed in Chinatown—Leroy’s Happy Place, Gene’s Dispensary—or at Paramount-Artcraft in Hollywood, that pulled us off track. Or maybe it was just childhood memory calling back: that thrill of picking up something with no reason, holding it, rubbing off the sand, deciding if it comes home with you. Treasure, or waste of time.

In LA, everything seems to move to nowhere. Freeways, delivery robots, drones, Instagram feeds. All is pointed at an unseen distance. Our walking, scanning, lifting, rubbing, deciding, inefficiency, pointlessness. Exactly for that reason, feels alive. It interrupts the digital colonization of time, invites the tide to take over, lets the sunlight play across grit and debris while seagulls judge our choices.

Back in the studio, after careful cleaning, we transform these objects into material constellations shaped by chance, touch, and repetition. Not sculptures. Not souvenirs. Not statements of skill. Assemblies of attention, traces of walking, sun, waves, LA dust, random fortune, post-digital, and post-Hollywood glitter. Hands matter. Time matters. Tide matters.

Sometimes we still laugh at what we’ve carried home. A tiny bottle, blackened embers, a shell that looks like it fell from Mars. They are useless. Inefficient. Pointless. And that is exactly the point.

These networks hold traces of unknown trips. They expose a world that continues while you scroll, swipe, and optimize. They remind us that friction, inefficiency, and small acts of attention still exist. They are small constellations of care, chance, and drift. They exist because we walked. Because we noticed. Because we wanted to.

And maybe, in the uselessness of noticing, that is enough.