When you enter the exhibit hidden behind a black curtain at the Bolinas Museum, a glowing blue sea urchin six feet in diameter emerges from a wall. From inside the hollow sculpture come ambient recordings; they sound at times like a buckling bridge and a spaceship zooming through a galaxy. A slit of light along one wall illuminates bottle caps; beside it, a tree knot encloses a diminutive video just a few square inches. The film silently loops frogs, rivers and a woman swimming.
Artist Charlie Callahan said the space is “like walking into someone’s mind,” but perhaps the mind envisioning such a scene could only belong to him. And if so, what exactly is he thinking?
To the 40-year-old Bolinas artist, the installation is a dark space expressing dark ideas about ecological turmoil. Each piece asks you to look through or into something. What you see or hear might be unsettling or beautiful, or both.
“The whole show is subtly backed by ideas of the world—that it’s really rapidly turning into this other place. We’re causing it and being affected by it. It’s subtly about that,” he said. (Some pieces in particular are “about death and isolation,” he casually added.)
The sea urchin dominating the room—embedded in a wall Mr. Callahan made from redwood fence posts—also continues his longstanding exploration of the creature. Sea urchins lose their hedgehog pins when they die, to reveal what he calls a mandala-like pattern that he has painted for years. The urchin also reflects his broader fascination with the ocean, which invites exploration while retaining the mystery of another world.
Mr. Callahan grew up in Ohio, a landlocked state with monotonous grey skies in the winter. He credits the sometimes-obsessive tendencies in his art to the days he spent drawing at home because the outside world was so dreary. He drew a lot of animals, but growing up in a flyover state might explain his adult fixation on the sea and its fauna, he said: “The ocean is like, to me, outer space.”
He went to art school in Columbus, then headed west. Mr. Callahan, who these days sports a scraggly strawberry blond beard and often wears a gold-studded black cap, felt like a “weirdo” in the Midwest; here, he is often “outweirded,” he said.
(That is not to say Mr. Callahan is not an idiosyncratic guy. In late 2013, the first time I met him, Mr. Callahan was holding a Styrofoam container with barnacles glued to it.)
He lived in San Francisco off and on for many years, making and showing art while he waited tables and worked various other jobs to pay the bills. Recently he moved to Petaluma, and in 2013 to Bolinas, where he had musician friends. (He plays drums.)
In the Bay Area, Mr. Callahan also surfs, another way he explores his fascination with the ocean: gliding along a wave, he can watch sea life pass by under his board.
Does he get scared, surfing in the sometimes tempestuous Pacific Ocean? He does. The ocean is intimidating, and he is aware there are great white sharks out there. “I know they see me,” he said.
Surfing in an ocean that can be brutal, that is never quite knowable, might be as crucial to his work as the hours he spends meticulously painting the urchin. Surfing “is scary,” he said recently, while working on the installation. “Some of that fear goes into my art pieces: the unknown, what could happen to you, what is gonna happen to us when we die.”
The exhibit is the first time he’s shown at the museum, and he says it quietly expresses his questions about the future of humankind and the environment.
The strip of backlit bottle caps looks cheerful, like it could have been installed in a candy store. The caps, though, are litter he collected along Ocean Beach in San Francisco, a reflection to him of the careless way many treat the natural world.
The sounds coming from inside the urchin are underwater recordings of walrus teeth chatter and harp seals. He was inspired, he said, by a congregation last fall of 35,000 walruses, which hauled out on the shore of northwest Alaska because they are running of out sea ice.
The giant urchin was modeled after a cast of a friend’s pregnant belly, and it prompts him to ask what kind of world he might bring a child into one day. It’s a good question, though one whose answer cannot be known.
Pondering that environmental degradation, you might spiral into a bout of doom and gloom, grieving for all the natural world stands to lose if the planet’s population continues to produce billions of metric tons of greenhouse gases every year.
But Mr. Callahan, by placing the sea urchin front and center, pushes his exhibit beyond broad questions about humanity’s ecological future and into more personal questions about life and death.
The sea urchin is a personal touchstone for Mr. Callahan, and he can talk about aspects of their life at length. Sea urchins are scavengers—“like the rats of the sea,” he said. They inhabit coastlines around the world, and their appearance shifts dramatically from place to place.
His art doesn’t depict sea urchins when they are alive, covered in colorful spikes; it depicts the pattern left on their shells when they die, a symmetrical pattern. (I’m tempted to ask: If you paint it over and over, if you surround yourself with an orderly beauty that you can see only when an urchin is dead, does death become a little less terrifying? Or do you just remind yourself that the unknowable is unknowable?)
The images are everywhere in his home, which also functions as his art studio. Sea urchins lie on a pair of square silkscreens in his living room. A half-finished painting in his bedroom shows a sea urchin shell encasing a table of NASA workers, one of whom who has become a mermaid. In another, a former girlfriend stands on the edge of a shell. Urchin shells have been placed over the heads of two figurines in his kitchenette. There are urchins, and sea stars, lining a driftwood shelf in his bedroom. There’s a photo of a 30-foot sea urchin mural he installed at Facebook’s headquarters. Even textured lamp bases, which in another home might seem normal, appear urchin-like.
On Sunday, he was working on a commissioned piece. A projector shone the image of—yes, a sea urchin—onto the center a wooden square with rays carved into it, creating a kind of halo of long-lost spikes. The projected image came from a photograph he’d made; he had held the shell in the light to cast dramatic shadows on it, a kind of chiaroscuro effect, he said. He would use the projection as a template to paint the pattern.
He planned to work on the piece that afternoon, but the day was so sunny. Instead, he drove up to Shell Beach, spread out a blanket and took a short nap. Afterwards, munching on an apple, cheese and chips, he talked about his art, about how he prays he never waits tables again, and about a hot springs he visited recently to try to relax after setting up his show. Then, around four o’clock, he took a few swigs of red wine, packed up and left the placid, almost motionless bay for the waves.
Charlie Callahan’s exhibit, “Returning Gold to the Sun,” shows until April 5 at the Bolinas Museum.