Unmoored, Chung 24 Gallery, San Francisco, CA

1/18/25 - 3/1/25

Unmoored presents two artists, Annie Claflin and Oriana Poindexter, whose art practices are deeply connected to marine ecosystems and the transforming environments of the shore and the sea.  Both find their source material on location in Southern California: Claflin, at the ocean’s edge, and Poindexter, in the sea below.  Both experimental and ritualistic in their creative practices, the artists employ distinctly different photographic methods to reimagine the unseen: the reconstructed coastal landscapes of memory and the undulating kelp forests below the horizon.

Poindexter collects her specimens while in the ocean and composes images that visually animate the swell and flow of the currents below.  Working in a variety of alternative processes — from blue cyanotypes, earth-brown Van Dyke and salt prints to multi-hued cyanolumens — she makes photograms that reveal a unique and dynamic portrait of a kelp organism in a one-to-one ratio (the shape we see is the actual size of the specimen). Poindexter delicately orchestrates the kelp’s organic shape, its holdfast, stipe, and blade, to create layers of varied translucency and cadence, suggesting a cosmic visual language. This swaying underwater forest made visible and abstract, from the large-scale Elkhorn Kelp cyanotypes to the intricately gathered Giant Kelp prints, depicts a celestial and mysterious world.

Claflin traverses the coastline, from sand to rippling wave, dune to vanishing horizon, anticipating an ecological future where the shoreline will disappear, submerged by rising water. In melancholic reverence, Claflin deconstructs the landscape through an innovative and layered method. Placing the printed image in water, she photographs the moment when the pigment separates from its paper substrate. Like a seascape unmoored, the diaphanous layer suspended in water translates photographically into cascades of blue, brown, green and ivory, now reshaped and sculptural, and akin to kelp.  The final images, floating upon a stark white void, reimagine a shoreline, now palpably creased and tucked, pulled and tugged, all of which suggests the shifting and sedimentary layers of remembrance and place. 

Unmoored  bridges a liminal space of intersecting tidal rhythms and memory, and invites reflection upon our impact on ecological place and preservation. As Claflin distills seascapes into tactile memories of a fragile ecosystem, Poindexter animates ocean specimens advocating for their sustainable future.