`Unbottled'
“It's such a beautiful object in itself but again, through the bottle, it tells the story of the Blue Rock Inn, which is one of Marin's first hotels. And we have photographs of when literally all that was there was that building,” she says.
What's clear from the seltzer bottle is that the bottles made in Marin were made to be reused. While the overriding message the exhibit isn't political, there is a message nonetheless.
The exhibit includes plastic bottles collected by West Marin artists Judith and Richard Lang, who have long made art out of plastic trash they have picked up from Marin's beaches, mostly Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore, as well as a bottle with a message in it, dating back to the Bush-Gore presidential election.
Plastic damage
“With that comes the message, what exactly are we doing? If this many tons of plastic ends up in the ocean, the ocean is the collector now. The ocean's collecting bottles, to the detriment of nature,” she says. “We're so disposable now that the
receptacle becomes the ocean.”
That said, Powell is clear that there's no agenda to the exhibit.
“We're not telling anybody how to live or take a stance on an issue. We want to be even handed when we talk about bottles, but you can't really talk about bottles without talking about plastic bottles. So bringing that in and having our visitors draw their own conclusions about it, that's really what we want to do,” she says.
Ultimately Powell is hopeful the exhibit speaks to a larger story of innovation and industry and how that shaped and continues to shape Marin and the
people who call it home.
“We want people to be inspired by what they're seeing … that they can learn about and appreciate the larger story of Marin, how we came about, all the creative industry that made Marin what it is today.”