Ode to a Shipping Container Lost at Sea

Ode to a Shipping Container Lost at Sea
steel, sand, 20"x 21.75" x 43"
2016

In 1993, a shipping container washed up on the beach in my town, strewing thousands of teddy bears, matching sneakers, dehumidifiers, and VCRs along the shoreline. To this day many of the town residents have the distinctive bears displayed proudly in their homes. I see shipping containers as an unlikely symbol of desire. They are the simplest, most generalized form into which we can pack the diverse objects of our wants, the supplies to our demands. The World Shipping Council estimates that 1,679 shipping containers are lost at sea each year. This number is derived from a voluntary survey of its member companies and is likely a low estimate. There are thousands of these boxes looming silently the ocean floor, they might be filled with teddy bears, or spark plugs, or toilet seats, or designer shoes. This piece reflects on the irony of romanticizing such an unromantic object, and points to the complexity of how these object function within our society. En masse, shipping containers symbolize global trade, corporate power, and a reliance on fossil fuels. Taken singly, they become personalized. They move goods across oceans like a massive boxy love letter, they become our storage units holding generations of our family history, they are repurposed into homes and office buildings. In their loss, they expose the way we value these objects, too expensive to recover, too inanimate to mourn. This sculpture is a miniature monument to a lone lost shipping container. It uses the language of the container— a sturdy steel frame, rippling corrugated sides— but none of the specific markers, doors, hinges, forklift cutouts, latches or text. At one corner, the side bends gently inward, revealing a tiny peek into the interior of the container, out of which sand pours onto the gallery floor.