The Raft of the Doldrums is the latest of the bottle caps series.  Inspired by Théodore Géricault's infamous painting, Raft of the Medusa, the early nineteenth century painting depicts the desperate survivors of the French frigate Medusa, which gained notoriety when it struck the Bank of Arguin off the coast of Mauritania in 1816.  The French Ministry of the Marine appointed the inexperienced Frigate-Captain Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys to lead the fleet. He had worked exclusively as a customs officer, but had acted against Napoleon during the fall of the emperor.  When the ship wrecked, some say due to faulty leadership, some 250 dignitaries took the lifeboats towing the remaining crew on a provisional raft made of masts and crossbeams.  Those in lifeboats soon realized that towing the raft was impractical. De Chaumereys decided to cut the rope and leave the rest of the crew to its fate, four miles off shore.  Géricault's consequential painting became highly controversial to the floundering French government, in no small part to its detournement of the traditionally romanticised painting size and technique. 

In its own way, the detournement occurring in the second part of the title, The Raft of the Doldrums refers to three virtual dead zones, gyres of floating plastic debris located in disparate parts of the oceans.  The largest measuring twice the sizes of Texas, these areas are congregations for numerous plants and animals who unwittingly ingest the plastic particles, the results of the photo degrading process.  Larger than life, the bottle cap come raft symbolizes the analogous water drop falling into the glassy smooth body of water, an illusion of its popular symbolic connotation in the ethereal, ephemeral, and pure.  Yet the cap is not ethereal, not pure, and certainly not ephemeral, potentially lasting millennia as it works its way up the food chain in an ironic twist of fate.  Instead monumentalising this raft, afloat in the permanence and reality of the manufactured material condition of our time, reciprocates Géricault's painting both in its pyramidal composition and political engagement.