Emily Schlickman Davis, CA Brett Milligan Davis, CA featured artists Emily Schlickman is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis, whose research explores design techniques for accelerated climate change. Schlickman received a BA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MLA from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Brett Milligan is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design at the University of California, Davis. There he is the director of the Metamorphic Landscapes Lab, dedicated to prototyping landscape-based adaptations to conditions of accelerated climatic and environmental change, through extensive fieldwork and transdisciplinary design research. Much of his work is based in California, undoing and reworking colonial legacies of land reclamation, water infrastructure, flood control, and fire suppression. Emily and Brett recently published Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation and Retreat in the Pyrocene. featured artwork Pyro Postcard Series help pick a new mascot Interested in exploring other creatures to to rival Smokey Bear's impact on America's take on fire suppression, Emily & Brett are surveying other options. Cast your vote for a mascot (many featured in the Pyro Postcard series) fitting of our pyro future on their website . responding to SIGHTLINES While we are based in Northern California and most of our work centers on the Sierra Nevada and Coastal Ranges, the questions and considerations we pose transcend political and geographic boundaries, as many places are facing similar wildfire conditions. Pyro Postcards is part of a larger futuring project about wildfire. The project invites collective speculation on the transformative nature of fire and the ways it can change the landscapes of the American West. For one certainty we have is that our fire-prone landscapes will be different from what they are today, and we don’t know exactly what they will become. But, by looking at a few horizons, we can imagine a multitude of futures. In presenting Pyro Postcards , we hope participants can feel their way into possible fiery futures and our potential role in making them. Some are bleak. Some are exciting. Some are just fucking weird and stick in your mind. more from their perspective Image of a prescribed burn Brett helped with to try to restore native grassland and Oak Woodland habitat on the UC McLaughlin Natural Reserve. He likes to assist with intentional burns where and when he can. Yolo County recently launched a prescribed burn association (PBA), a community-based network focused on educating and training residents about intentional fire practices. This is an image of their first burn just north of Capay, California. Emily likes to spend time in burn scars to observe how landscapes respond to wildfire events. This is an ash sample that she collected from the footprint of the LNU Lightning Complex Fires. above: LNU Berryessa left: Quail Ridge Reserve These images are part of photographic documentation Brett takes of landscapes to see how they change and regenerate after wildlife. These locations feature chaparral habitats in California after burning in LNU complex fire in 2020. This is an image of an indigenous-led cooperative burn in Cobb, California. Emily is part of TERA’s on-call ecocultural fire crew for the 2023-2024 season. This is a sample of design work by landscape architecture students Madison Main, Yining Li, Xinyi Gao for the Field Guide to Transformation studio Brett recently taught. In this studio students worked together to re-envision how the UC McLaughlin reserve might become a place for more proactive fire research, offer hands-on experiential learning for students, and foster greater ties to surrounding communities. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Karin Bolender / Rural Alchemy Workshop Philomath, OR The Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) is a station for collaborative, experimental art-research practices that root in ecologies (all the faunal, floral, mineral, and chemical forms that comprise them), rural-urban cultural frictions, and specific acts of un/naming and imaginative, responsive, and respectful more-than-human storying and habitation. Founded in Carnesville, Georgia in 2008, the R.A.W. has worked at the edges of Philomath, Oregon’s patchwork forests and pastures since 2013. The prime investigator and main anarchivist of the R.A.W. is artist-researcher Karin Bolender, aka K-Haw Hart. The R.A.W.’s transdisciplinary projects hold space for ‘untold’ more-than-human stories and experimental anarchives within meshes of landflows and waterways, domestic and wild mammals, plants, microbes, and many others. featured artwork "RQP Card," Traditional rodeo queens, when making public appearances as ambassadors for the Western Way of Life, are armed with "autograph cards," which they sign for admirers. The Rodeo Queen of the Pyrocene, being a fugitive of sorts, does not proffer public appearances or signatures. Yet investigations have nevertheless turned up what seems to be an autograph card, one of few existing pictures of them. Authorities suspect it may serve as some kind of coded communique to those on their trail. responding to Fuel Loading Through pursuit of an elusive and radical figure known as the “Rodeo Queen of the Pyrocene,” the R.A.W. investigates a flammable mare’s nest of rural-urban frictions grounded in generic myths of the “Western Way of Life,” as they manifest in Pacific Northwest forestry, ranching, conservation, and other land-management practices, in both obvious and less visible ways. As an official “ambassador for the Western Way of Life” (the job description of most every rodeo queen), the RQP thunders in and out of arena spotlights, waving a spectacular, distracting red flag amidst the more hidden dimensions of cultural, capital, and fossil flows and legacies that shape the land as we (don’t) know it and fuel its range of conflagrations. But hounding the hot trail of the RQP, as she makes her rounds from the Arctic Circle to Down Under, is a posse of undercover agents and herbivorous grazers, mounting a widespread back-burn operation against her unchecked reign. This underground network is known to have cells in places known as “Oregon,” “California,” “Scandinavia,” and “Australia” (though those might well be code names). In cahoots with a globally dispersed posse, the R.A.W.’s investigation seeks to track and catalog actions and methods involved in efforts to predict and assuage the ever-shifting paths and cycles of the Pyrocene Queen’s wild rides. The R.A.W. is rooted in Philomath, OR, in the thick of western forests and their industries, management practices, conservation aims, and related conflicts. Philomath is also home for 50+ years to a major node of PNW rodeo culture, the Philomath Frolic and Rodeo. The RQP grows directly out of this vortex of storied and submerged western “pulp frictions”: too-slow reckonings with questions of climate crisis within rural-urban cracks, and even longer, deeper, pricklier engagements with domestic herds and flocks and the ways they and their feral cousins inhabit and graze the grasses, shrubs, and forest edges of precarious earthly places. Regionally, the RQP is also linked to hotspots in California, including burning deserts and a specific plot of former pine forest in Paradise, to which the R.A.W. has familial connections across five fast and furious generations of settler enterprise. more from R.A.W.'s perspective Rodeo Mystery Clues #11 and #5: From the anarchives of the R.A.W.'s ongoing investigation, these images show the Philomath Rodeo Grounds in the Great Rodeo Gap Year of 2020, in early summertime when the activities of the RQP were smoldering underground. Rodeo Mystery Clue #7: A fire broke out at the Philomath Frolic and Rodeo Grounds in early summer 2022, two weeks before the rodeo was to take place. The fire consumed roughly a third of the historic grandstands before it could be contained. No perpetrator has been identified. Perhaps it was an accident; these things happen. Chat back to exhibition Chat

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