Jan. 4: "Art on Fire" with Julie Comnick and Bryan David Griffith
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Stonebrook, Shelley
Dec 30, 2021, 5:25:45 PM12/30/21
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Hi Friends,
You know that incredible feeling when you look at art and feel changed, when something clicks in your mind and you see a new layer to something? That is how we feel about Julie Comnick and Bryan David Griffith's art about wildfire. We are really looking forward to welcoming them next week as the first speakers in Spring Creek Project's winter lecture series Lookout: Envisioning Futures with Wildfire.
You know that incredible feeling when you look at art and feel changed, when something clicks in your mind and you see a new layer to something? That is how we feel about Julie Comnick and Bryan David Griffith's art about wildfire. We are really looking forward to welcoming them next week as the first speakers in Spring Creek Project's winter lecture series Lookout: Envisioning Futures with Wildfire.
Here's the registration info, and we're including much more about Comnick and Griffith's work below. We hope you'll join us!
Julie Comnick and Bryan David Griffith
"Art on Fire"
Tuesday, January 4, 6 p.m. PST
Free and open to everyone
"Art on Fire"
Tuesday, January 4, 6 p.m. PST
Free and open to everyone
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After personal experiences with wildfire, Comnick and Griffith studied wildfire in the field with scientists from The Southwest Fire Science Consortium as part of the collaboration Fires of Change. This art-sci project, which included funding the National Endowment for the Arts, brought 11 artists together with fire managers and scientists to integrate fire, climate science, and art, offering a unique interpretation to the community. It culminated in a group art exhibit, and Comnick and Griffith each went on to exhibit solo work about wildfire.
Comnick has had many solo exhibits nationally and group exhibits internationally, and has taught interdisciplinary courses in painting, drawing, art theory, and public art. Her paintings and drawings pose questions about our social circumstances and practices. Her project Ashes to Ashes is a series of drawings depicting 14 significant Arizona wildfires from 1990 to the present, rendered with charcoal samples personally collected from each fire site.
Working with the unrefined, burnt remnants of Ponderosa Pine or Manzanita found at each wildfire site presented creative challenges, such as achieving tonal range and detail on a small scale, and meeting contemporary expectations with an archaic medium, says Comnick. "Each charcoal piece from each fire is so unique," she says. "Some of it is soft and dark and makes these beautiful marks that instantly seems to blow off the page. Others are full of this debris and mineral deposits so they scratch into the page."
One of the drawings from Comnick's Ashes to Ashes project.
The collection of 14 drawings from Comnick's Ashes to Ashes project.
Comnick says that while regular wildfire cycles are essential for the health of the ecosystem, they are frequently accompanied by negative public perception of wilderness devastation and human disaster. She notes that one of the objectives of these drawings is to reverse the public perception trajectory as viewers gain a renewed appreciation for the necessity of wildfire toward sustaining the longevity of our shared landscape.
Bryan David Griffith explores profound issues using simple forms and materials in unexpected ways. An interdisciplinary artist, he works across multiple media and learns or invents new techniques as needed to convey the concepts in each body of work. In 2016, Griffith won the Flagstaff Arts Council's Viola Award and the Phoenix Art Museum's Artist Grant for his work on wildfire. His traveling exhibition Rethinking Fire, which is on view at the High Desert Museum until January 9, 2022, explores the issues behind catastrophic wildfires, from past land management practices to climate change. Fire itself is used in different ways to create each painting, sculpture, and installation in the exhibition. Materials include smoke, ash, charcoal, stone, burned leaves, and wood, among others. Issue commentary by scientists and notes by Griffith accompany each work.
"Broken Equilibrium," a piece in Griffith's exhibit Rethinking Fire, is a walk-through installation of burned trees salvaged from wildfire sites and trees from thinning projects.
In framing Rethinking Fire, Griffith says that in Western culture we often view dualities—light and darkness, life and death, forest and fire—as opposing forces in an epic struggle of good vs. evil. We see ourselves as fighting to preserve life and subdue death by taming nature to prevent unpredictable disasters like wildfire.
He says his work explores the idea that these forces aren't opposed, but rather part of the same continuous cycle. For thousands of years prior to European settlement, low to medium-intensity fires burned frequently in dry Western forests. Many native species are adapted to depend on fire or the diversity of habitat it creates. But as a result of past logging followed by decades of fire suppression, today's forests are younger, denser, more homogenous, and less drought-resistant than historical old-growth forests. This forest structure combined with accumulated needles and branches on the ground provides fuel for unnaturally hot, ecosystem-destroying fires to develop during periods of extreme weather. By trying to prevent death, we have inadvertently severed the cycle of life.
Now, Griffith says, wildfire is coming back with a vengeance, like a river breeching a dam. And these destructive fires are getting more frequent with climate change: Today the average fire season is 78 days longer than in the 1970s. At the same time, residential development has expanded dramatically in fire-prone areas, making management more difficult, ignitions more likely, and fires more dangerous and expensive to fight.
Griffith investigates all of these concepts in his work on wildfire, attempting to create a charged atmosphere where a viewer can spark their own discoveries, sometimes different than his. Deborah Ross from Visual Art Source called Rethinking Fire "a breathtaking commentary on human interference with nature."
In their talk "Art on Fire," Comnick and Griffith will share more about these projects, detail their approaches to creating art in conversation with science, and discuss how art can be a catalyst for change.
After personal experiences with wildfire, Comnick and Griffith studied wildfire in the field with scientists from The Southwest Fire Science Consortium as part of the collaboration Fires of Change. This art-sci project, which included funding the National Endowment for the Arts, brought 11 artists together with fire managers and scientists to integrate fire, climate science, and art, offering a unique interpretation to the community. It culminated in a group art exhibit, and Comnick and Griffith each went on to exhibit solo work about wildfire.
Comnick has had many solo exhibits nationally and group exhibits internationally, and has taught interdisciplinary courses in painting, drawing, art theory, and public art. Her paintings and drawings pose questions about our social circumstances and practices. Her project Ashes to Ashes is a series of drawings depicting 14 significant Arizona wildfires from 1990 to the present, rendered with charcoal samples personally collected from each fire site.
Working with the unrefined, burnt remnants of Ponderosa Pine or Manzanita found at each wildfire site presented creative challenges, such as achieving tonal range and detail on a small scale, and meeting contemporary expectations with an archaic medium, says Comnick. "Each charcoal piece from each fire is so unique," she says. "Some of it is soft and dark and makes these beautiful marks that instantly seems to blow off the page. Others are full of this debris and mineral deposits so they scratch into the page."
One of the drawings from Comnick's Ashes to Ashes project.
The collection of 14 drawings from Comnick's Ashes to Ashes project.
Comnick says that while regular wildfire cycles are essential for the health of the ecosystem, they are frequently accompanied by negative public perception of wilderness devastation and human disaster. She notes that one of the objectives of these drawings is to reverse the public perception trajectory as viewers gain a renewed appreciation for the necessity of wildfire toward sustaining the longevity of our shared landscape.
Bryan David Griffith explores profound issues using simple forms and materials in unexpected ways. An interdisciplinary artist, he works across multiple media and learns or invents new techniques as needed to convey the concepts in each body of work. In 2016, Griffith won the Flagstaff Arts Council's Viola Award and the Phoenix Art Museum's Artist Grant for his work on wildfire. His traveling exhibition Rethinking Fire, which is on view at the High Desert Museum until January 9, 2022, explores the issues behind catastrophic wildfires, from past land management practices to climate change. Fire itself is used in different ways to create each painting, sculpture, and installation in the exhibition. Materials include smoke, ash, charcoal, stone, burned leaves, and wood, among others. Issue commentary by scientists and notes by Griffith accompany each work.
"Broken Equilibrium," a piece in Griffith's exhibit Rethinking Fire, is a walk-through installation of burned trees salvaged from wildfire sites and trees from thinning projects.
In framing Rethinking Fire, Griffith says that in Western culture we often view dualities—light and darkness, life and death, forest and fire—as opposing forces in an epic struggle of good vs. evil. We see ourselves as fighting to preserve life and subdue death by taming nature to prevent unpredictable disasters like wildfire.
He says his work explores the idea that these forces aren't opposed, but rather part of the same continuous cycle. For thousands of years prior to European settlement, low to medium-intensity fires burned frequently in dry Western forests. Many native species are adapted to depend on fire or the diversity of habitat it creates. But as a result of past logging followed by decades of fire suppression, today's forests are younger, denser, more homogenous, and less drought-resistant than historical old-growth forests. This forest structure combined with accumulated needles and branches on the ground provides fuel for unnaturally hot, ecosystem-destroying fires to develop during periods of extreme weather. By trying to prevent death, we have inadvertently severed the cycle of life.
Now, Griffith says, wildfire is coming back with a vengeance, like a river breeching a dam. And these destructive fires are getting more frequent with climate change: Today the average fire season is 78 days longer than in the 1970s. At the same time, residential development has expanded dramatically in fire-prone areas, making management more difficult, ignitions more likely, and fires more dangerous and expensive to fight.
Griffith investigates all of these concepts in his work on wildfire, attempting to create a charged atmosphere where a viewer can spark their own discoveries, sometimes different than his. Deborah Ross from Visual Art Source called Rethinking Fire "a breathtaking commentary on human interference with nature."
In their talk "Art on Fire," Comnick and Griffith will share more about these projects, detail their approaches to creating art in conversation with science, and discuss how art can be a catalyst for change.
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Shelley Stonebrook (she/her)
Program Coordinator
Spring Creek Project
Hovland Hall 102B
Oregon State University
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