Sun Works

November 9–May 6, 2012

The sun's power to illuminate, yet also to scar, makes itself known in the works of Sarah Charlesworth and Chris McCaw on view in Sun Works. Part of a larger series that explores how current events are represented photographically in the media, Charlesworth's Arc of Total Eclipse (1979) tracks a solar eclipse across the front pages of multiple newspapers. Like Charlesworth, McCaw is also interested in questioning the role of the photograph as a simple representation of reality. For Sunburned GSP #488 (2011), he used a handmade view-camera to capture the path of the sun on a paper negative, creating an ambiguous, ethereal image.

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Sarah Charlesworth: Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979, 1979/2010 (detail); twenty-nine Fuji Crystal archive prints; dimensions variable; gift of Seymour and Alyce Lazar, new printing made possible by a bequest of Phoebe Apperson Hearst.

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Sun Works

November 9–May 6, 2012

The sun stars in artworks by Sarah Charlesworth and Chris McCaw drawn from the BAMPFA collection. Playing the role of a silent collaborator, the sun's power to illuminate, yet also to scar, makes itself known in the works on view, one a signature work by a major Conceptual artist (recently restored in collaboration with the artist), the other a new acquisition by an extraordinary emerging artist. For Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979, Sarah Charlesworth photographed the front pages of a series of local newspapers to document the course of a solar eclipse on a single day as it passed from the Pacific Northwest, across Canada, and toward Greenland. With the exception of the newspaper mastheads, she removed all accompanying text to isolate images of the eclipse from each of the periodicals. The resulting prints convey a haunting sense of the power of this celestial event to “eclipse” the everyday chatter of the mass media. Arc of Total Eclipse is part of Charlesworth's larger Modern History series, in which the artist explores the dynamics of photographic representation of current events in world newspapers. Employing a radically different process, Chris McCaw's evocative Sunburned GSP #488 (Sunset/sunrise, Galbraith Lake, Alaska) (2011) also tracks the path of the sun across the sky.Using handmade view-cameras of his own invention, McCaw creates unique gelatin silverpaper negatives that incorporate burn marks made by the rays of the sun along with etherealphotographic images. The artist explains, “The subject of the photograph (the sun) hastranscended the idea that a photograph is a simple representation of reality, and has physically come through the lens and put its hand onto the final piece.”

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