Our Laguna: The telling story of the Tell and its influence

Cal State Fullerton’s Grand Central Art Center is mounting an exhibition recognizing the influence of Laguna’s BC Space Gallery on the Southern California art community.

A retrospective is scheduled to run from at the Santa Ana center from February through April, with an accompanying book.

“They contacted me about nine months ago,” said Mark Chamberlain, who co-founded BC Space with Jerry Burchfield. “It is nice to get recognition and acknowledgment that your time has been well spent.”

The gallery is probably most famous to the public for the Tell, the monumental tribute to the natural beauty and history of Laguna Canyon, which was slated for development in the late 1980s.

“Tell is an archaeological term for an unnatural mound of artifacts and evidence of prior civilization,” Chamberlain said.

Two years in the planning, the Tell was 636 feet long, 34 feet at its highest point, an undulating silhouette in wood, words and photographs that echoed the hills that shelter the canyon.

Chamberlain and Burchfield fought for permits and approvals from the Arts Commission, the city, the county and the state.

And they tested.

“We knew exactly how the weather and time would change it,” Chamberlain said. “We knew the brightly colored pictures of spring would fade to the sepia tones of fall and winter — some born away by the winds.”

Construction began on April Fools Day 1989. Eighty-eight post holes were dug to support the wooden framework and the plywood skin on which more than 100,000 photographs would be pasted.

“On May Day, about 400 students and supporters began pasting,” Chamberlain said.

Supplies included a 50-gallon drum of white glue.

“Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people participated, donating photographs and they came back time and again to see their pictures,” Chamberlain said. “For some of them it was the first time they had stepped on the land.”

The Tell was only supposed to be up for five months. But the story it told continues to resonate.

“It was given unofficial permission to remain and it served at the destination for the Walk,” Chamberlain said.

Depending on who is counting, 5,000 to 10,000 opponents of the proposed Laguna Laurel development in the canyon walked down Laguna Canyon in November 1989 to protest the desecration of open space.

“Mr. Bren [Irvine Ranch owner Donald Bren] says to this day that the Walk and the Tell did not influence him, but right after that, he began negotiations with the city,” said Mary Fegraus, founding executive director of the Laguna Canyon Foundation. “We could have had just a march, but we also had this wonderful piece of art by Jerry and Mark, a project that so many people worked on.

“So often they are forgotten in the history of the canyon, but that is why we chose a photograph of them at the Tell for the Nix Nature Center,” she said.

The Nix is the information and activity hub of the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, which includes Laguna Laurel.

“It gave us a tremendous sense of satisfaction when Bren finally agreed to negotiate and the huge vote in 1990 by the residents to tax themselves to buy the property — particularly when other areas were voting against green projects,” Chamberlain said.

Unfortunately, most of the dismantled Tell was stored in Canyon Acres and was lost to posterity in the 1993 fire.

However, Chamberlain has the tail end in safekeeping.

“Someday, it may be finished, but it has to be the last thing I ever do.” Chamberlain said.

He also has in the gallery “Private Property,” a 5-foot, 5-inch tall sculpture composed of found pieces — the legs are stakes on which barbed wire was strung at Sycamore Hills — and artifacts that pertain to Chamberlain’s life and his alter ego that guarded the Tell.

“Private Property” was created when it was suggested that the Tell needed a security guard.

Chamberlain boasted that his services were never needed. No acts of vandalism were ever reported at the Tell.

“When people asked why we did the Tell, I pointed across the road to the earth movers,” Chamberlain said. “It energized opposition, gave opponents a voice.”

But the Tell was only one component of the gallery’s Laguna Canyon Project, Phase 8 in the project now in Phase 15.

“According to Jerry’s journal — he kept much better records than I did — we had talked as early as 1974 or 1975 about what we could do to protect the canyon from the red tile tsunami coming over the hills,” Chamberlain said.

However, by the time the Tell opened, Burchfield was no longer associated with BC Space.

The gallery, which had opened on April Fools Day 1973, could not provide the financial security Burchfield and his wife, Barbara, felt they needed as new parents in 1987, Chamberlain said. He decided to begin teaching photography full time at Cypress College, where he is now a full-time professor and director of the Photography Gallery.

Chamberlain and Burchfield had met in 1971, when Chamberlain curated a photographic exhibit for the winter Festival of Arts, at the behest of late Bill Thomas, owner of a Laguna camera shop.

“We hit it off immediately,” Chamberlain said. “We were both passionate about photography as an art, but I didn’t know then what that meant and I still don’t. You can’t put a box around art.”

And it’s difficult to put a box around Chamberlain.

Mark Phineas Chamberlain was born in Dubuque, Iowa, an only son, slated to the join his father in the Insurance brokerage his grandfather had started.

Chamberlain was struggling with his father’s plans for his future, when Vietnam intervened.

“Two days after I got my master’s degree on Feb. 4, 1967, I was drafted into the Army,” Chamberlain said.

Both events are memorialized on “Private Property’s” chest by a master’s tassel and dog tags.

After basic training, Chamberlain expected to end up in Vietnam.

Instead he was sent to Korea.

He took some language and history classes. Then one day, he picked up a camera and joined a military crafts program.

“It was a formative time in my life,” Chamberlain said. “I spent all of 1968 in Korea where I watched the Martin Luther King and the Bobby Kennedy assassinations. I saw the Chicago Convention. From my perspective the country was falling apart, due to a war where I almost became fodder.”

“I feel a certain sense of obligation toward the men who didn’t make it back,” Chamberlain said.

By the time Chamberlain got out of the army, his father had died. The pressure was off.

“I decided to pursue what I had a passion for,” Chamberlain said.

In 1969, he packed his 33 mm Pentax in an MG Midget and headed west, with the notion of opening a photographic gallery.

He stopped in Los Angeles. Hated it. Visited his sister Belle and brother-in-law Doug Chalmers in Laguna. Loved it.

He met the late Bea Whittelsey and he took photographs for her for the Historical Society.

But he had to eat and support his wife and son, now living in Santa Ana — so he painted houses, picking up commercial photography jobs when he could.

In 1972, a commercial client asked whether Chamberlain would process film for them. It required a facility, which Chamberlain found by accident.

“I was answering an ad for a desk and I walked in here and fell in love,” Chamberlain said.

The client backed out, but Burchfield and Chamberlain moved ahead with their dream of a studio/gallery, which lasted for 14 years before their paths parted.

“Jerry has made a beautiful career exhibiting his work,” Chamberlain said. “But the gallery activities are more important to me.

“I seldom show my own work.”

Instead, the gallery is a forum for his dedication to the environment, to art, to humanity — and any other windmill that he thinks needs a tilt.

BARBARA DIAMOND can be reached at (949) 380-4321 or [email protected].