Galerie Miranda in Paris presents the exhibition California/Mississippi by San Francisco-based artist John Chiara (b. 1971). The exhibition (Oct. 26 to Dec. 8, 2018) presents selected works from these two landmark series in the artist’s practice.

John Chiara pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium through his choice of process and the mastery of its possibilities. His approach is distinguished by its incredible physicality and recalls the early days of the medium when artists dealt with heavy, awkward equipment and endured long exposure and development times. Chiara’s giant cameras, which he designed and built himself, are transported to locations on a flatbed trailer to produce one-of-a-kind large-scale prints. The design of the cameras, which resembles that of daguerreotype box cameras, allows the artist to simultaneously shoot and perform his darkroom work while images are recorded directly onto oversized photosensitive paper (not film). This process, which Chiara first discovered as a student in 1999, 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. … The psychological weight of memory burns the visual experience into the mind. As time passes, the tie to what the memory was originally linked to can loosen, but the visual image remains.” The artist often chooses deliberately nondescript places to photograph, what he calls “in-between spaces…the type of places you would normally walk past without paying much attention”. Given the time-consuming and labor-intensive nature of his photography, John Chiara chooses to work in one place for extended periods of time that also allow him to thoroughly get to know its different light and enabling him to previsualize the possibilities of what the final image will be, “I respond to the qualities of the light and the way it envelops the landscape - the way the light is captured and held by the paper. I leave room for the noise from the photographic process itself to complete the work.”

California: The series was produced in 2012-13 and Galerie Miranda will present only images taken in Los Angeles, perhaps one of the world’s most photographed city after Paris. However Chiara’s approach results in images that transcend conventional depictions of place and transforms familiar landscapes into hypnotic visual passages through the ordinary world. His depictions of Los Angeles are profoundly new: finding neither an idyllic rural Eden, a sprawling urban hell or a city of spectacle, Chiara instead hones in on delicate transformations in the environment, both natural and man-made. His interest lies with the psychological underpinnings of the city’s development and the subtle ways these are revealed in the shifting landscape. His Los Angeles images are both surreal and powerfully direct: the blazing sun reflecting off modernist building facades; the sun, again, blinding us from behind lush vegetation; a hillside exploding with scorched earth; dry, mineral building and landscapes. The exhibited California works feature in the book California (John Chiara, Aperture Foundation and Pier 24, 2017) which includes an excellent essay by Virginia Heckert (Curator and Department Head of Photography, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles) that situates John Chiara’s practice within the history of American landscape photography in California, citing notably Eedweard Muybridge, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Robert Adams). Signed copies of the book will be on sale at the gallery during the exhibition.

Mississippi: During 2013-2015 John Chiara made numerous trips along the Mississippi Delta, choosing Coahoma County for the project. Coahoma County has a strong oral tradition and locals possess a deep historical and cultural knowledge of the region, the birthplace of the Delta Blues. Chiara put down temporary roots, ultimately spending several months, ten days at a time, immersed in the culture and getting to know the land. He studied the area throughout drastically different seasons, from the sweltering summer and its shocking greenery to the relatively dormant fall and winter months when the landscape is unnervingly exposed, “There are worlds within worlds in Coahoma County… The sun radiates and creates an energy here like no other place. This is due to the water table being approximately ten feet below the large flat plain that is Coahoma County. This is an area that has consistently flooded over and over again for several thousand years, making it one of the most fertile regions of the world.”

For the Coahoma County work Chiara utilized two different cameras to produce over 100 photographs at 34 x 28.25 inches and 50 x 53 inches. The photographs made during this time reveal the rich quality of the Mississippi earth with subtle notes of local history—all rendered in exquisite detail. The resulting prints are haunting, lush, and characterized by an exceptional luminosity. This series was made possible thanks to a collaboration between ROSEGALLERY, Seven Chimneys Farm, and The Porch Society.

John Chiara received his B.F.A. in Photography from the University of Utah in 1995, and his M.F.A. in Photography from the California College of the Arts in 2004. He has been an artist in residence at Crown Point Press, San Francisco, in 2006 and in 2017; at Gallery Four, Baltimore in 2010, at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts in 2010 and at the Art Factory, Budapest (Hungary) in 2017. In 2011, Chiara's Bridge Project was commissioned by the Pilara Foundation, San Francisco, and was included in the Pier 24 Photography group exhibition titled HERE. In 2012 Chiara was one of thirteen international artists whose work was included in the exhibition Crown Point Press at Fifty at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C., and at the de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He curated and participated in an exhibition In Conversation - June Schwarcz and John Chiara at the Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California in 2012. The Pilara Foundation commissioned Chiara a second time in 2013 for the group exhibition A Sense of Place at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco. Concurrently, Chiara's work was included in Twisted Sisters: Reimagining Urban Portraiture at the Museum Barengasse, Zurich, Switzerland, and in Staking Claim, a California triennial invitational at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Art. In 2015, Chiara was one of seven artists featured in Light, Paper, Process, Reinventing Photography, at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 2016, Chiara’s work was included in A matter of memory: photography as object in the digital age at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York.

John Chiara’s photographs are currently on view in the Denver Art Museum’s exhibition, New Territory: Landscape Photography Today, and will be featured in the New Southern Photography exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans from October 6, 2018 – March 10, 2019.

Works by Chiara are in numerous private and public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA; and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, TX.

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