John Chiara: Sea of Glass

Chiara describes his creative process as “part photography, part sculpture, and part event.” Using large-scale cameras that he builds himself, he prints directly onto photographic paper, controlling the exposure time as he dodges, burns, and filters the images. The resulting works of art are luminous and one-of-a-kind, inviting us to contemplate their content while they point to the physical and chemical aspects of their creation.

Other images combine the remaining wooded areas on Yerba Buena Island with flora in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Exposing these prints for a third time, Chiara turns the paper around and exposes it to sunlight, allowing the unfiltered light to directly hit the back of the emulsion. Elements of the landscape emerge and recede from these complex, layered compositions. Dense with wildlife, they hint at how it might have felt to have experienced the island when it was still an Ohlone fishing village called Tuchayune. They are also fictive landscapes, a place that is both and neither, speaking to the subjectivity of our memories and experience. 

Sea of Glass also includes a selection of large-scale photographs of San Francisco, shot from across the bay on Treasure Island, the city’s skyline bisecting a wide expanse of sea and sky. These latest landscapes capture the effects of light and its movement, as it animates the water’s surface or filters through dense clouds and marine layer. Here, Chiara’s inventive methods yield images that subvert and refresh our reading of these familiar, postcard-perfect vistas, as the stylistic signatures of his process — uneven hand-cut edges, subtle chemical streaking, tape marks, and the unexpected placement of recognizable landmarks — lend a sense of disorientation and discovery.