Chris McCaw: Marking Time

The show Marking Time comprises nearly forty works ranging from monumental to intimately scaled pieces resulting from McCaw’s unique “sunburn” photographic process, previously unseen solarized landscapes, and color polaroid experiments. Brand new multi-panel exposures join unseen early works from the artist’s personal archive, pieces exhibited in the landmark 2015 Getty Museum exhibition Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography, and several published in McCaw’s most recent monograph.

Following a lifelong obsession with the darkroom and years as a renowned platinum printmaker, a happenstance event in 2003 led to years of experimentation during which Chris McCaw (American, b. 1971) developed a proprietary process that has cemented his work as singular in the history of the medium. Over the past two decades, McCaw has perfected this inventive technique, exposing vintage darkroom papers directly in-camera to create one-of-a-kind solarized landscapes that capture the sun’s movement while pushing the boundaries of analog photography.

The prolonged exposures, often several hours long, burn and scar the paper as the sun is focused by the lens of his enormous, custom-built cameras like a magnifying glass directly on the final photographic object. Artistic vision must balance the science of optics, chemistry, and astronomy as McCaw’s compositions calculate for the season, weather, and earth’s rotation to create his dramatic views of the West Coast. Each work bears a unique recording of celestial time and place.

McCaw’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Art Museum, AZ; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Portland Art Museum, OR; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and Somerset House, London, UK. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Chrysler Art Museum, Norfolk, VA; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK, among many others. McCaw is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Andy Warhol Foundation's New Works Grant and Alternative Exposure Grant, as well as the Emerging Icon in Photography award from the George Eastman House. The artist lives and works in San Francisco, California.