Plastic, Beauty, and Human Traces

Andy Hughes: Photographic Works, September 19 – November 22, 2026

Walk on the beach and opening with the artist

Walk on the beach with Andy Hughes: Saturday, September 19, 2026, 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm RSVP

Opening: Saturday, September 19, 2026, 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

This exhibition at MONO 30 presents a selection of works from Dominant Wave Theory (2006), a major photographic series made by Hughes between the late 1990s and 2005. First published as a book in 2006 by Booth-Clibborn Editions in London and Abrams in New York, Dominant Wave Theory developed while Hughes was learning to surf and spending increasing amounts of time photographing the coastline. The project grew from his encounters with the marine debris he found along the shore, gradually shifting his attention towards the material traces of human consumption and the meeting point between oceanic systems and global consumer culture

Made with one of the earliest generations of digital SLR cameras, the photographs give discarded plastics an extraordinary clarity. Rather than approaching the subject as environmental documentary, Hughes draws on the seductive visual language of advertising and European painting. Objects are isolated, carefully lit and formally composed, inviting the viewer to notice colour, texture and form before recognising what they are looking at.

This delayed recognition is central to the work: beauty gives way to ecological awareness. A discarded lighter, bottle cap or fragment of plastic becomes strangely monumental, resembling a landscape, geological formation or even a planetary object. Hughes has described the process as “plastic photographing plastic.”

Produced more than twenty years ago, Dominant Wave Theory now feels remarkably prescient. The objects depicted continue to circulate through oceans and ecosystems, becoming enduring traces of the systems of production, consumption and disposal that shape the world around us.

Alongside the works from Dominant Wave Theory, the exhibition includes one new image made during Hughes’s Gaga Air residency in South Korea, extending the project’s ongoing engagement with the relationship between human consumption, landscape and the material traces we leave behind.

In conjunction with the exhibition, MONO 30 will screen Gyre: Creating Art from a Plastic Ocean (2013), a 22-minute documentary directed by J.J. Kelley in partnership with National Geographic. The film follows scientists, artists and educators investigating marine debris along the remote Alaskan coast, connecting environmental research with artistic practice

More about the artist: https://www.andyhughes.net/