McDade's images interweave effectively with the color photographs also on exhibit by Norman Locks, who has worked for many years in the Sierra wilderness region and increasingly explores those uneasy margins where forests and lakes give way to gas stations and billboards. Often textural contrasts, the sheer design work of branches and rocks, flowing water and still foliage distinguish pieces like Big Creek, Big Sur . Often the potential power of questioning juxtapositions is sabotaged by an insistence upon embedding two or three photographs within a single mat. Overall the show rewards multiple viewings, bringing us back time and again to our own encounters with the darkness at the edge of town, of the forests and landscapes of our remembered youth. Destruction and regeneration, on scales both vast and intimate, heroic and mundane, form the unifying theme.
Locks hems in a slice of pristine meadow with two menacing logging trucks.
Cycles and Change reverses the activist mantra and gives us the political as the personal. Cycles and Change, Trails and Journeys , paintings and photographs by Jennie McDade and Norman Locks, is now on display at Cabrillo College Gallery through April 16. For info, call 479-6308.