John Chiara : California - Mississippi   26/10 - 8/12/2018

The exhibition presents selected works from two landmark series in the artist’s practice, distinguished by its incredible physicality due to the transport and handling of the giant cameras built by the artist.  The design of the cameras allows the artist to simultaneously shoot and perform his darkroom work from within the camera itself and his images are recorded directly onto oversized photosensitive paper (not film). This process invites anomalies in his final prints that create a rawness but also a lyricism in his pictures.

Since 2004 Chiara has used photography to pursue the metaphorical association between memory and place. Photography has a long a complicated relationship with memory, which seems to always be in flux. Memories are unbound, with divergent edges. You have to move around in them to get to points of clarity. ... As time passes, the tie to what the memory was originally linked to can loosen, but the visual image remains.

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