In 2018 alone, California wildfires released more than forty-five million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They burned 3.65 million acres, destroyed 26,634 structures, and killed 137 people. Six of the ten worst fires occurred in the eighteen months ending August 2019. Sixteen of the twenty largest fires in California history occurred in the last twenty years. But nature has its own balances and counterbalances. Wildland fire is expunged, extinguished, overpowered. Extreme wildfire suppression is a hallmark of industrial society. California is built to burn, and it’s built to burn explosively. In addition to artists obsessed with the elemental, the exhibition features work by California’s top acknowledged fire photography specialists.įire is natural in the western ecosystem, but it holds danger within it like a seed. In the end, though, what Quintana chronicles is spirit, resilience, and the abiding persistence of memory. She registers her loss by documenting seventy charred objects sifted from the powdery ash-charcoal husks of cameras bodies, slumped remnants of rings, a bisque doll hand. Quintana, meanwhile, builds a photographic memorial to her house and studio consumed by Napa’s 2017 Atlas Peak firestorm. A decade later, the Woolsey Fire burned 96,000 acres, destroyed 1,643 structures, killed three people-and fired six of Mayer’s sculptural pieces. She intended them to be fired by wildfire. In 2008, Anna Mayer placed a dozen unfired ceramic sculptures into valleys and hillsides along the Malibu coastline. These artists are like poets who enter a burning building and bring back reports of majesty, fear, and flame. Together, they face fire, sift its aftermath, and struggle with its implications. The artists of Facing Fire bring us incendiary work from active fire lines and psychic burn zones. There is a powerful consensus that we have entered a new era-nature unbalanced, the end of the stable world. In the past two decades, however, West Coast wildfires have exploded in scale and severity. Quintana, Justin Sullivan, and Joan Wulf.Ĭalifornia’s diverse ecologies are fire-prone, fire-adapted, even fire-dependent. The artists include Noah Berger, Kevin Cooley, Josh Edelson, Samantha Fields, Jeff Frost, Luther Gerlach, Christian Houge, Richard Hutter, Christoph Kapeller, Benoit Malphettes,Anna Mayer, Cody Norris, Stuart Palley, Norma I. There will be an Opening Reception: February 29, 2020, 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.and the exhibition runs through August 9th, 2020. This massive exhibition looks at fire as omen and elemental force, as metaphor and personal experience. Opening on February 22nd, UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography will host the exhibition, Facing Fire:Art, Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the New West, curated by Douglas McCulloh.

Wildfires, raging out of control, spreading into towns and neighborhoods and wreaking havoc and significant loss are becoming an annual event. We are kept alert by tremors and shakers that seem to state,”Don’t get too comfortable”, but another disaster, insidious and onerous, has equaled in its horrors. Natural disasters are ever increasing with climate change, and in California, we have been bracing ourselves for The Big One for decades. ©Stuart Palley, El Portal Fire, Yosemite National Park, Dye sublimation print on aluminum 2014, Courtesy of the artist

2018 project canvas ybhs