‘10,000 Fahrenheit’ heats up SF Arts Commission gallery

Charles Desmarais, SF Chronicle, September 25, 2018
An art exhibition built around global warming sounds like a downer.
 
But “10,000 Fahrenheit,” on view at the San Francisco Arts Commission through Nov. 17, is no rehash of the horrid environmental news of the day, no self-righteous polemic. An exhibition in progressive San Francisco can rightly assume that most visitors share the frustration and abject fear engendered by knowledge of what we are doing to our planet.
 
Rather, without a hint of treacle, the show is an elegiac visual ode to the sun, the Earth and the frail relationship between the two.
 
Though relatively small — it comprises no more than 25 works, the products of nine artists — the exhibition is everything much larger presentations on topics of current political import try, and fail, to be. While potentially raising awareness, it offers no simplistic solutions, implicitly recognizing that everyone must find their own way, ecological or political, activist or personal.
 
There might be a time for sloganeering, a place for marching and making righteous noise. This, however, is a space for reflection.
 
Chris McCaw’s photographs are frequently exhibited in the Bay Area, yet his method of working retains its interest for viewers. Using hand-built cameras and specialized lenses, he concentrates the power of the sun so intently on his paper negatives that the in-camera sheets darken, scorch and, sometimes, burn. That metaphor of savage vision is employed here in a 2015 work titled “North Slope, Alaska, Within the Arctic Circle,” a long picture made in a revolving camera that followed the summer sun in its meanders across the Arctic sky.