On April 18th, Craig Krull Gallery will open three concurrent exhibitions on the subject of the California Coast. Connie Jenkins: Spring Tides is a series large-scale paintings of tide pools in the Channel Islands, Jasmine Swope: Our Ocean’s Edge is an environmentally sensitive photographic project focusing on the Marine Protected Areas of California, and Matthew Chase-Daniel: Monterey Littoral consists of photo-assemblage grids of the Monterey Bay Wildlife Refuge.

For more than four decades, Connie Jenkins has used water both as subject matter and metaphor. She recognizes the ebb and flow of tides, like the seasons and other natural cycles, as fundamental connections to our natural environment. Her recent tide pool paintings also bear a relationship to photo-realism but, as Jenkins explains, in painting water, she has “tried to paint the visual patterns with which our brains construct images—a shared illusion.” The water is rippled and foamy, blurring and bending the shapes of the purple sea urchins and green anemone below. By focusing on a horizonless bird’s-eye view of the water, Jenkins flattens the image, making it both an illusionistic representation of water, and an abstraction of paint marks which acknowledge the canvas as an object. The tide pool’s surface becomes the picture plane where illusion meets abstraction.

Jasmine Swope’s project, Our Ocean’s Edge aims to promote an awareness and appreciation of the network of Marine Protected Areas along the California Coast. Working with traditional film encourages Swope to “slow down, become intimate with the subject, and allow the picture to present itself almost intuitively.” Her images are printed in the palladium process, affording a subtle range of tonal variations. A new Nazraeli Press publication, Our Ocean’s Edge, features Swope’s images, an essay by naturalist author Dwight Holing, and a foreword by scientist and wild water advocate, Dr. Wallace J. Nichols.

For fifteen years, Matthew Chase-Daniel has created photo-assemblages that reflect the dynamic experience of seeing. His grids of images represent a temporal, cinematic unfolding of the visual encounter, usually positioning images that are nearby on the bottom row, and scanning further into the distance in the upper rows. In 2014, Chase-Daniel made several extended trips along the coast from Cambria to Point Reyes, exploring the reaches of the Monterey Bay Wildlife Refuge. Monterey Littoral interprets locations such as Point Lobos and Muir Beach from the minutiae at our feet to the distant scanned horizon. This series also includes a new direction in his work, tracking Pelicans and Turkey Vultures. Individual images of silhouetted birds, once composed in grids, become invented flocking patterns.