Franta Skala, a young artist from Prague, fashioned the objects in his “Headlands Seahead” show almost entirely out of flotsam and jetsam that had washed up on the beach while he was in residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts outside of San Francisco, but the guiding sensibility—in its mixture of gnomic whimsy and golemic dread—was unmistakably Eastern European. In fact, some of these same objects have been chosen to represent the Czech Republic at the Venice Biennale later this year.

Skala was a member of the secret organization known by the initials B.K.S. (the anagram translates to “