Finding the Beauty in Everyday Reality

One of Chamberlain’s works in the Soka Exhibition. Soka University will host a closing reception for “Reflections by an Armchair Arteologist” Friday, May 14, from 5-8 p.m. Chamberlain will give a brief talk on “environmental artivism” at 6:36 p.m.

Laguna Beach-based artist Mark Chamberlain’s “Reflections of an Armchair Arteologist” retrospective covers several decades of his work. It’s a fine celebration of a long career dedicated not only to the art of the camera (his principal medium) but also to large scale murals and installations, works in collage and assemblage, and collaborative works involving not only his late associate, Jerry Burchfield, but in one notable instance, an entire community.

Arteologist is Chamberlain’s neat neologism, which aptly describes the way he works. His curious eye impels him to “dig” with his camera into the reality that surrounds him, whether natural or cultural. Acutely aware of the passage of time, his pictures seek passionately to preserve momentary events before they are gone, to mark the occasion of their passing, or sometimes to draw attention to their transition as they wither and die. He is fascinated by Future Fossils, the title of a long series of photographs which document, with often ironic amusement and sometimes gentle sadness, the phenomena that characterize this moment of our American civilization -a gas station, a neon sign, a billboard - with the wise understanding that they are very soon, in the great sweep of time, destined to be things of the past.

Finding the beauty in everyday reality, Chamberlain brings his meticulous craftsmanship to the creation of images that convey that reality in its smallest, most intimate detail. His photographs engage us not only in the phenomena his keen eye selects, but in the enduring mystery of their presence in the world. In his assemblage work, that same fascination with the mystery and temporality of objects leads him to extricate them from their original, mostly superannuated context, and invent for them an often whimsical new life in art.

It’s this same embrace of the world’s reality that leads this artist to his broader concerns for the natural environment and for a more harmonious co-existence with the planet. He has been a fierce leader in the defense of the natural surroundings of the small jewel of a city in Southern California where he has lived and worked for many years, against the predatory assaults of suburban developments and the highways built to service them. Included in the exhibition is extensive documentation of The Tell, a 636- foot long collaborative photomural project built in part as a community statement in defense of the Laguna Canyon against plans for yet another new Orange County housing tract. Long protected from the suburban sprawl by its green belt of wilderness land, Laguna Beach is a unique community increasingly hemmed in by commercial real estate interests, and its citizens are engaged in continuing vigilance and activism to maintain its integrity.

The walls of The Tell were plastered with family photographs and memorabilia contributed by hundreds of people in a demonstration of solidarity and communal dedication to a sustainable civic future. The Tell itself, with its title referencing the trove of an archeological dig, was thus a meeting place of past, present and future, a celebration of what is now, and a fraught vision of the “fossil” that it would become. Massive public demonstrations spawned by this enormous art project helped prevent development of that landscape which now is an integral part of the Laguna Coast Wilderness.

Chamberlain’s activism, as locals well know, has not been restricted to environmental and civic concerns. His gallery, BC Space, has also long been a feature of the Laguna Beach landscape. Modest in scale, though not in vision, and almost anonymous in its lack of storefront appeal, this gallery has provided continuing, active support for artists of the region; not those “beach artists,” I hasten to add, whose work attracts the eye of summer tourists, but serious working artists devoted, for the most part, to the kinds of issues that Chamberlain addresses. I tend to see it as yet another realization of the artist’s vision, an act of aesthetic generosity that extends his embrace of what he loves.

Kudos to Soka University for this act of recognition, which is well deserved and timely. We are rapidly reaching crisis point in what we are pleased to think of as our culture, and a great deal of the art we generate is toothless mainstream stuff. Chamberlain reminds us that it’s possible for an artist to have a social conscience, and to participate, as an artist, in the preservation of the best of what we have.

Republished from the Huffington Post with the consent of the author. Clothier is also the author of “The Buddha Diaries” and “Persist: In Praise of the Creative Spirit in a World Gone Mad with Commerce.”