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John Chiara | Sean McFarland
In his ongoing series Land’s End, John Chiara composes large-scale landscape photographs without film. The artist climbs inside a huge, hand-built camera to expose sheets of Cibachrome paper, meticulously manipulating them. Though the resulting images announce Chiara’s interventions, including the outlines of the tape with which he affixes the paper to the camera, they’re full of surprises—such as the skewed horizon lines of Grizzly Peak at Summit (2008), in which the trees and houses of Alameda County seem to march downhill, or washes of chemicals that resemble waves.
Like Chiara, Sean McFarland immerses viewers in landscape photos that are mysterious yet familiar, like half-remembered dreams. Both artists live in San Francisco, graduated from the M.F.A. program at California College of the Arts and use experimental, labor-intensive processes to create otherworldly images of nature. Yet it’s the differences in how they photographically remix the natural world that animate this exhibition.
McFarland starts by improvising. For his series Pictures of the Earth, he sifts through disparate images of deserts, seas and funnel clouds, and fuses them digitally. Once he reshoots them as small black-and-white Polaroids, works such as Lightning (2009)—in which a bolt of light flashes over a dark landscape—feel formal and intentional, and all signs of the artist’s hand disappear. While the layers of light in Chiara’s photos seem far removed from the dark, spare beauty of McFarland’s, the artists’ divergent processes yield equally transcendent experiences.
