From New York: Fort at Lime Point

John Chiara’s milky, murky, mesmerizing pictures of Northern California landscapes at Von Lintel Gallery, in New York—1890s artillery nest roads, sun-rich scrub, sloping San Francisco neighborhoods—work slowly and plaintively. Gradually, shrubs, weeds, and mid-century flat-roofed hillside homes give way to fine details and a suffering that suggests estrangement and unresolved events.

Chiara was raised in the 1970s and ’80s in the Bay Area and watched patiently as his father slowly developed prints in a makeshift darkroom inside the family’s garage. Today, he crawls in and out of a large-scale hand-built camera he transports to outdoor locations on a flatbed trailer and prints directly onto paper he cuts out of the camera. The results are jagged, lustrous pictures.

In interviews, Chiara mentions legendary photographer Richard Misrach, a mentor, and Lewis Baltz, a member of the seminal New Topographic photographers, with whom he shares a tendency to list the precise location where photographs were taken.¹ However, it is Chiara’s interest in chance that recalls Italian conceptualist Silvio Wolf, whose photochemical Horizons (2003–2009) produced hypnotic, emotional results. It also aligns him with American landscape photographer Bryan Graf and his Wildlife Analysis pictures.

Unfortunately, Chiara’s Endura transparencies appear less like accidents and more like feats or tricks. It is his sun and fog-rich, emotionally soaked Cibachromes, all from 2011, that stand out instead. Each image evinces a gentle struggle or decline.

In Bunker Road at Coastal Trail, Fort Barry Range (Right), fluorescent yellow buttercups glow faintly alongside a fogged-in caramel-colored dirt path like redemption; a long, close look reveals scores of the tiny flowers in the undulating, misty

Bunker Road at Coastal Trail, Fort Barry Range (Right), 2011; image on Ilfochrome paper, unique photograph; 33 1/4 x 28 3/4 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Von Lintel Gallery, New York. 

emerald wilderness. In Coral: Starr King: Beacon, dense scrub glint and vibrate as if holding a secret; nearby circlets of smokelike fog seem cinematic. And in Funston at Cascade, a neighborhood seems to sink helplessly into moist fog or a gray-green sea; a hazy, translucent band hovers mystically above. 

For the patient, Fort at Lime Point incrementally releases a kind of sadness. Chiara’s pictures, which wear his cuts and tape, call to mind found photographs, and the inscrutable way memory works, or grief. There’s a burnt, raw quality here. There’s also eloquence.

Fort at Lime Point is on view at Von Lintel Gallery, in New York, through January 7, 2012.

Brent Foster Jones lives in New York and previously taught at California College of the Arts.

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NOTES:

1. Pier 24 Photography. "Bridge Project 2011, John Chiara." http://www.lightdark.com/TVD.html