Ninety percent of the world’s goods travel by sea. The efficient movement of all our stuff from the vague there to the present here is made possible by container ship. The San Francisco-based artist Martin Machado has an unusual firsthand perspective on this tool of globalization: He spends several months of the year working on container ships, on routes that have taken him through the Suez Canal and to ports in cities as far-flung as Honolulu; New York; Dubai; Karachi, Pakistan; Shanghai; and Singapore.
On board, Machado is often hired for watch duty, looking for hazards on the water, and for steering ships in and out of port. But he also draws and paints from his cabin and takes photographs, some of which he posts to Instagram. His latest art, inspired by the 18th-century journals kept by Captain James Cook during his famed “voyages of discovery” around the Pacific, has to do with re-representing the first moments of contact between isolated societies and the Western world.
Machado’s recurring theme is the shipping container itself, loosed from its transport and floating on the sea. There is no record of how many containers are lost at sea each year, but maritime organizations estimate that there are probably hundreds of them floating in the ocean at any one time. Last month, 12 containers fell off a ship belonging to Matson, a shipping company headquartered in Hawaii, on its way to Seattle; one container and its contents washed up on San Francisco’s Baker Beach.
In Machado’s newest series, contemporary figures meet historical ones in a kind of dreamscape. Machado replaces the traditional vessel — a canoe, say, or a tall ship — with the container, which ferries its own very modern ideas into the scene. The images contain deliberate echoes of the explorers and artists who sailed with Cook, because, as Machado explains, this era is fleeting, too. “The containers, ships and runs are all going to change,” he says. “I’m trying to capture this moment of time on the sea.”
In the slideshow are selections from Machado’s new book, “An Ocean Between Us.” At press time, he is on a Matson ship on the run linking Hawaii, Seattle and Oakland, Calif.
