“Chimera” featured in artdaily
SAN LUIS OBISPO, CA.- The San Luis Obispo Museum of Art announces Chimera: The Future of Nature, Central Coast artist Marcie Begleiter’s debut museum exhibition, on view July 3 – October 17, 2026.
Chimera: The Future of Nature is a series of films, photographs, and sculptures by Central Coast artist Marcie Begleiter. The work explores the ways that climate change is reshaping the natural world.
Begleiter collects objects from the environment, such as bones, seed pods, and dried plants, which she then uses to build her own detailed and modified landscapes. These hand-built worlds, along with her field photographs, become the raw material for five short films that use digital animation to add wind, water, and movement to the still images. The result feels like something between a documentary and a dream.
Installation of “Chimera: The Future of Nature” at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, 2026
About the exhibition:
Chimera: The Future of Nature is a series of films, photographs, and sculptures by Central Coast artist Marcie Begleiter. The work explores the ways that climate change is reshaping the natural world.
Begleiter collects objects from the environment, such as bones, seed pods, and dried plants, which she then uses to build her own detailed and modified landscapes. These hand-built worlds, along with her field photographs, become the raw material for five short films that use digital animation to add wind, water, and movement to the still images. The result feels like something between a documentary and a dream.
The work is grounded in climate science research, particularly understanding how living systems evolve in response to rapid environmental change. A chimera (in mythology, a creature of mixed parts from different species) becomes the artist’s metaphor for ecosystems that are finding unexpected ways to survive. In this exhibition, Begleiter utilizes the same material and re engages it in multiple ways: in film, sculpture, photography, installation, and sound, to welcome close looking and reflection on environmental catastrophe and hope. These are not images of loss alone, but are portraits of stubborn and surprising resilience.
Still from the animation “Vanitas”
