John Chiara's 'Sea of Glass' reframes nature on Treasure Island / San Francisco Examiner
Ever since Ansel Adams started taking pictures in and around San Francisco roughly 100 years ago, the cityscape and its surroundings have remained a popular muse for photographers. By now, it feels overdone. Can photographers still find new ways of looking at such familiar sights?
John Chiara has an answer. The local photographer’s latest exhibition — “Sea of Glass,” at Haines Gallery at Fort Mason Center — includes landscape photographs highlighting the relationship between nature and humans. Chiara shot most of these pictures during a recent residency as part of the Treasure Island Photo Documentation Project, an initiative by the San Francisco Arts Commission tapping five local photographers to document the ongoing redevelopment of the island. Human interventions in the landscapes are also present in the pictures, each with a familiar structure included in the background. The composition of trees in “Carolina: Traverse: John F. Kennedy,” is interrupted by the presence of a light post. In “Coral and Martin Luther King Midway,” Sutro Tower snags the eye.
These intrusions call attention to what doesn’t belong in these pictures — the trees themselves. Eucalyptus trees, abundant on Yerba Buena Island and in Golden Gate Park, were planted by settlers throughout the 1800s, symbolic of the kind of colonialism as itself a form of urban development. There’s no telling what the finished development project on Treasure Island will look like, but it certainly won’t look the same again. By exploring how certain elements of nature are manmade, Chiara also urges us to view the manmade as akin to nature — ever-evolving and temporary. - Max Blue