OCEANO
a monograph of images and texts will be available in fall 2023, published by Kehrer Verlag
I look to the white garden of the dunes.
The vast shadow-suckled sand.
Where the colors flash and never issue
But flow through hidden veinage;
I am naked to the sun.
I let the sun print on me as on the dunes.
With great passion of surrender, I have peace.
-Hugo Seeling (Dunite Poet) excerpt from L., published in Wheel of Fire, Round Table Book Co, Oceano, 1936
While these Dunes often appear as a blank, shifting landscape, Oceano weaves rich histories spanning over 12,000 years – from the expunged Native American inhabitants to the present-day ATV riders – to consider the current politically charged landscape of the Oceano Dunes. These are the dunes of the Chumash, nearly erased by the Spanish Missionaries; the dunes of Cecil B. DeMille’s ancient Egyptian The Ten Commandments movie set, buried in the sand in 1923 and currently being unearthed; the dunes of the Dunites – the artists, poets, nudists, and mystics living in the dunes in the interwar period; the dunes of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams’ modernist perfection; and the dunes of the current day Dunites – the ATV, motorcycle, and dune buggy riders and their RV village.