CIMM online exhibit features great white shark photos, art

OXNARD—Channel Islands Maritime Museum announced an online exhibit featuring photographs and original art focused on great white sharks. Due to state and Ventura County health orders related to Covid-19, the museum remains closed but its “Fragile Waters: Predator or Prey?” exhibit will still debut on Sept. 10 in an online format.

Starting Sept. 10, virtual visitors will be able to view the exhibit and scan photographs and original art on CIMM’s website, cimmvc.org. The exhibit will be live through Dec. 21. The exhibit aims to help explain how these sometimes feared but little understood creatures help support a healthy ocean.

Works include up-close, underwater photographs of great whites taken by Photographer Ralph Clevenger. Clevenger said in a press release from CIMM, his photography better “allows us to understand them and helps to demystify their reputation as ‘ferocious man-eaters.’”

Works also include “Actual 3D” paintings by artist Kathy S. Copsey. Copsey’s paintings include texture (molding paste, pumice gel, gloss gel, etc) to create a contrast between the areas with only paint and areas with texture. In a press release from CIMM she said this gives the viewer the sense the animals are real and they could reach out and touch the texture of an animal’s coat, feathers, or fur.

Great white sharks have captured the imagination of people around the world. They are the Earth’s largest predatory fish and predator-prey interactions play a major role in ecology, with important implications for population dynamics, management, and conservation.

“Studies of large shark foraging behavior are important for understanding the ecology of these species and are particularly important in light of steep declines in their populations and the recent realization that they have important structuring roles in marine communities,” CIMM said in a released statement about the event.

For more information on the exhibit, visit cimmvc.org.