Opening reception: January 13, 2024, 6-8 PM
Casemore Gallery is pleased to present Alluvial Fan, Strange Attractor, an exhibition of works by Sean McFarland including the artist’s first-ever large-scale sculpture. In this new exhibition, McFarland continues his investigation of the interplay, deep complexity, and beauty of the earth as a system, creating a place for us to think about how all is interconnected, including ourselves.
McFarland’s large-scale photograph Eureka Valley, 2022-2023, shows an abundance of distant alluvial fans across a vast desert landscape, marking where water flowed down mountains to the basin and radiated outward. The deposited sediment creates forms of intricate, branching channels and patterns which appear to replicate at varying scales. In Geology Illustrated, John S. Shelton writes, “The fan is a monument to the death of the stream that builds it.”
Working from a self-generated archive comprising tens of thousands of items, McFarland’s practice is a continuous revisiting of site, image, object, and experience. Materials such as silver gelatin prints, cyanotypes, drawings, rocks, desert sage dust, and glass are combined to make photographs, collage, and sculpture. The resulting works are at once a meditation on place, phenomena, how we are present and how we remember.
The collective works in the exhibition act as a narrative of the strange attractor – a unique and unpredictable dance that certain systems perform over time. One such attractor, the Lorenz attractor, is a set of chaotic solutions used in describing the butterfly effect, the phenomena in chaos theory when one small event, like the flapping of a butterfly’s wing, can produce a dramatic outcome in a complex system like the weather. Over time, the flight of a butterfly may alter snowfall or cloud cover, affecting the flow of water down mountains and the form of the alluvial fan.
The mountains and deserts of California are the primary setting for intricate framed collages, inkjet prints, cyanotypes measuring the sky and clouds, a 13-hour photographic rock clock and a large sculpture.
Sean McFarland (California, 1976) received a MFA from California College of the Arts, Oakland (2004) and a BS from Humboldt State University, Arcata, California (2002). His solo exhibitions include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2017); Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, New York (2015); San Francisco Camerawork, San Francisco (2009), and White Columns, New York (2004). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA (2018); George Eastman Museum, Rochester (2016); Aperture, New York (2014-15); and Bay Area Now 6, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2011). His work is in the permanent collections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; George Eastman Museum; and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
McFarland has received numerous awards, including the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2017), the Eureka Fellowship (2011), the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer (2009), and the John Gutmann Photography Fellowship (2009).
He lives in San Francisco and teaches at the School of Art at San Francisco State University.
