THE CRYSTAL COVE

ART ACTIVISM & OCEAN PLASTIC 

by Katie Cercone, NYC

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The genesis of Andrei Jewell’s Crystal Cove is the organic outflow of his 15 year long work with The Holiwater Project, a multimedia initiative around the decline of India's sacred Ganges river in support of it's environmental champions serving to preserve and protect the iconic river, culminating here by extension, with a call to action to remove all ocean plastic from our seas.

Amidst an escalating global, “water is life” movement, the social practice and political aspects of 'The Crystal Cove' project tackles the Thai island of Koh Phanang Tri-Bay’s local issues: the gradual loss of sea life and the dramatic rise of ocean plastics washing up on Thailand's gulf island shores associated with island tourism, the local fishing industry and the mountains of unprocessed waste carried downstream and out to sea by most of the surrounding country's rivers of South East Asia.
 

When Andrei was offered the opportunity to premier one iteration of 'The Crystal Cove' as a multi-channel video installation during the True-Nature sacred arts festival at Why Nam Beach October of 2018, the artist welcomed the opportunity to gather his fellow karma yogis and clean up the bay Butoh-protest style.

Riding on the consciousness of unity and togetherness invoked by the spirited festival descending on the Cove’s cosmic threshold, Jewell organised a series of community clean up activities using multimedia art, dance, song and movement under the banner of the festival-wide #lessplasticmorefantastic tagline. He also projected his film oceanside on closing night accompanied by the album's soundtrack created by Darshan Atmosphere producer Tikki Masala. The expansive beauty of both the soundscapes coupled with Jewell's moving and still images have already inspired action around the clean-up of plastics suffocating the area’s delicate eco-system, calling upon the awakening dreamers, artists, visionaries and thought-leaders trickling into the festival to take action.

Aspects of the campaign launched during True Nature quickly took on a life of their own. Adorned with mud and plastic, the subjects of this particular iteration , a  three-channel video installation, provoke our innermost sense of the tribal at the same time they use discarded plastic to open unto new and uncanny aesthetic territory. Jewell shortly later released a deftly crafted Super 8mm rendition, 'I AM OCEAN' entirely made as a challenge  'in-camera' without any post-production editing . This film premiered at the ground-breaking EMINENT DOMAIN exhibition overtaking the former Robert Miller space in white-cube Chelsea, New York City, provoking viewers in one of capitalism’s most hyperspeed consumer centers. In 'I AM OCEAN' Jewell’s dreamlike tableau of mermaid-like women, waves and plastic is elevated by a simple soundtrack of only whale songs, the subtle music emitted from whales highly developed nervous systems used for sonar - more of those sounds which feature in the album but mixed with highly crafted and subtle compositions. A behind the scenes mini documentary about the making and clean up around 'I AM OCEAN' made by Jewell and his cohort editor / filmmaker Ulrike Piechert titled, 'LESS PLASTIC MORE FANTASTIC' was showcased in 2019 at Cannes Lion Festival, France as a call to action to the global advertising and creative media industries to take note - the world is changing, fast!

Jewell's curious use of upcylcled plastic certainly invokes the extremity of suffocation, at the same time, objects and particles of plastic scavenged from the beach and surrounding area become wondrously playful adornments, headdresses of the boho chic, emblems of the tribal family Jewells. Andrei informs that the pieces of plastic serve as “ intervention-devices,” a feature characteristic of his work overall we see in other photography series of his. The artillery of media and genre the artist engages goes on, spanning photographic realism to abstraction. With mud sticking to bodies like paint, and plastic growing out and up and every which way, the work even achieves at times a semblance of the post-racial. The portraits have an undeniable fluxus-like ritual function that bleeds through the surface at first glance. “Find your soul’s blue print and wake up to your full potential,” says Jewell. Ultimately, his work serves the community and the earth on many levels, a battle royal reclaiming the divinity found in the body waged against our era of knowledge in which too many lack real wisdom.