Remember the Camp Fire in Paradise, California? It wasn’t the first catastrophic wildfire, and horrifically, not the last. What follows is a project about resilience, reality, and adaptation. It’s about what we each retain when we lose, about objects that no longer have value, except as memory. Something of value can be an object, a person, or for those of us who grew up with assumptions as to our very environment–transformation.
Optimism is easier when it’s snowing. Unless we’ve been direct victims of forest fire and the effects of severe drought, we tend to forget–as if wishful aspirations wipe out our memory. “Oh, it’s raining, it’s snowing, the drought is over.” No. It’s not, and even if it were, there are other stresses on water supply in California and elsewhere that continue. If pioneering humans had listened to John Wesley Powell’s dire warnings, we wouldn’t have the West as we have it today. There never was enough water for humans.
The inspiration for Simple Objects: An Excavation
At the Tate Museum, London, in 2003, I was captivated by an exhibition of artifacts found in the River Thames during construction, created as a “Cabinet of Curiosities.” I examined tiny items retrieved from the mud by volunteers and installation artist Mark Dion.
Fast forward to January 2019. I was scheduled to have an exhibition at a Sacramento gallery that June. I don’t like creating work for an exhibition for several reasons. One, my most rewarding projects relate to transforming the appearance of public spaces on a large scale. Second, the business side of my personality thrives on making a sale first (a commission), getting partially paid, and then delivering a project. Anything less is work made on speculation. Yes, that’s crass but it’s my reality.
I’d inherited my parent’s house several years prior, a warm and loving home full of mementos and memories, paintings, antiques, albums full of other people’s lives. Too much stuff. I’d purged some and kept some, and was thinking about a series of drawings of these simple things that I’d chosen to keep and what each symbolized for me.
So why do I write about art on a site that’s about water?
What follows is a project about what we retain when we lose, about objects that no longer have value, except as memory. It’s about resilience, reality, and adaption. Something of value can be an object, a person, or for those of us who grew up in an abundance of water from Sierra snowpack, it can be water.
And when there’s no water, there will be fire.
In November 2018, a fire started in forested foothills near Paradise, a town 20 miles west of where I’d been born, in Chico in the Sacramento Valley. Two months later, I listened to a woman read an essay about her family who had lost everything in that fire, a fire so explosive and catastrophic that people fled for their lives. Her family had survived but nothing was left of two homes except things that had a higher burn temperature than the fire.
I asked her if she’d collaborate with me on my June exhibition, “Simple Objects:” drawings and photography of everyday things–the things that survived that fire, in those two homes.
The fire began the process of curating, and as we poked through the ashes, we began to choose and to think about what we lost and what we can keep. She had her approach, an intimate and personal response. I, in contrast, came to the objects with the detachment of an observer. We were bound to come into conflict, sadly, and we did.
Fire causes change: in landscapes, in watersheds, in creatures including humans, and about how things in the West are all intimately connected, by fire, by drought, by water.
By deconstructing a project that meant so much to me, I hope to understand the relationships between the humans, the ocean, the valley, and the mountains and the watersheds that connect what may soon be so fractured.
Purchase the book Simple Objects: An Excavation