Continuing through March 7, 2026
There’s something ineffably attractive about a line drawn on an opaque ground, whether it be white chalk on a blackboard or a beam of sunlight on a dark green hill. Most of the photographs in Chris McCaw’s “Reversals and Revolutions” explicate that sentiment. McCaw uses extraordinarily long exposures of film to document the movement of the sun as it traces its path across the sky.
In recent years a handful of West Coast photographers have emerged who make unique thought objects, contradicting the long-held expectation that the end product will be multiple identical prints. Their approach frequently involves long distance travel in order to obtain just the right outdoor conditions to yield the images they envision.
Klea McKenna goes to dark Hawaiian mountaintops to let raindrops accumulate on large sheets of photosensitive paper which she briefly exposes to the beam of a flashlight. Meghan Riepenhoff shoves a tray of light-sensitive paper into moonlit icy surf. Vanessa Marsh works in a studio darkroom in which she has invented a complex layered method to create photograms. She brings a convincing three-dimensionality and color to her unique images, which are made without a lens.
McCaw adds to the challenges he’s set up for himself by doggedly scrounging for the exact paper he prefers from eBay and other more obscure sites, even though the traditional size of that paper forces him to accept seams in his prints. Such a drawn-out exposure has caused McCaw an even more dramatic and unexpected problem. The lens focusing on the slowly moving sunlight causes the film occasionally to burn. In fact, he had to punch holes in the camera bellows to allow the smoke to escape, or else it would have ruined the film.
A few years earlier McCaw recorded a complementary image at the equator titled “Sunburned GSP #1150 (Galapagos)” (2012). Like getting to northernmost Alaska, making one’s way to the Galapagos Islands is not a simple jaunt, as they are located six hundred miles west of Ecuador far into the Pacific. In this print, the sun travels in a straight line perpendicular to the horizon, resembling nothing less than a NASA rocket launch at night, complete with the requisite beach scene reflecting sunlight in the water. However, in both “Sunburned” pieces, and throughout the exhibition, the world is wearing its blackest nocturnal evening wear, thus amplifying the mysterious drama of the work.
“Sunburned GSP #959 (Puget Sound)” (2017), is bookended by scraggly leafless trees to the left and right, with two central sections displaying a lake view in the dim background over which the arc of the black sun bends across the horizon. It pays homage to the traditional Chinese full moon bridge architectural illusion while reinventing it in bleak terms.
The disc motif is repeated in several of McCaw’s new “Inverse” series, which explores panoramic landscapes that are often disrupted by circular framing devices. In “Inverse #122 (Lakes Basin)” (2025), an image of dense forest at the edge of a lake is composed within a circle. That binocular-like image is surrounded by a continuation of the forest to the squared edges of the six sheets of paper, but the trees are presented in negative solarization. Solarization, a basic in-camera building block of photography, has by now been overused, especially in movies, to convey disturbance, alienation and otherworldliness, so it presents a challenge to both artist and viewer to overcome its familiar formulaic use.
“Inverse #76 (Mojave)” (2023), documents four similar Monument Valley-like rock formations shot from right to left, alternately in black and white and solarized white on black. The consistently low horizon line gives away the continuity of the scene, while the sky going from black to white is achieved by masking the image behind a specially fitted card. In these photographs, solarization succeeds at serving a function, helping McCaw achieve the uncanny ability to utterly transform how we perceive the world by means of a simple technological ploy.
