John Chiara: Sea of Glass

Haines Gallery proudly presents Sea of Glass, an exhibition of new work by San Francisco photographer John Chiara. Focusing on the dynamic forces that continually re-shape the city, Sea of Glass features a striking new body of work created during the Chiara’s recent residency on Treasure Island — located in the waters separating San Francisco and Oakland — as well as images made on nearby Yerba Buena Island and elsewhere along the bay. The exhibition marks Chiara’s fourth solo exhibition with Haines.

 

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.

 

In 2022, Chiara was invited by the San Francisco Arts Commission to document changes being made to Treasure Island, a 400-acre man-made island just minutes from the city. Originally constructed to host the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, Treasure Island is currently in the midst of a massive, decades-long redevelopment plan. Mirroring the conditions of its creation, the site’s narrative is once again one of possibility and invention, shaped by complex socio-economic forces.

 

Chiara’s Treasure Island works reinterpret the experience of meandering through a neighborhood that straddles the old and the new. Carefully composed images of aged and industrial exteriors draw our attention to shifting elements of the landscape and shed new light on seemingly nondescript places. Navy Mound, Center of Treasure Island (2023) appears at first glance like one of his oceanscapes, but the work’s horizon line is marked by wire and nails, and glittering light reflects off of a crinkled plastic tarp instead of water.

 

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. Within these evocative, atmospheric photographs, the changing light and fog so distinctive to San Francisco parallels the story of a city in transition.

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.