featured artist Miriam H Morrill Vancouver, WA Miriam Morrill is a retired biologist and wildland fire management specialist. She spent most of her career working with communities and fire management agencies across the western United States helping them plan, prepare, and adapt to wildfires. In retirement, she developed an education program and guidebook about observing, journaling, and sketching the fire environment called Pyrosketchology . She lives full-time in a fifth-wheel trailer with her husband and two dogs, traveling and journaling about nature and fire. featured work Pyrosketchology is an approach for building awareness of the fire environment through observations, sketching and nature journaling practices. The book is intended as a guide to create deeper awareness and educational support for fire-adapted living. Miriam defines the fire environment as the mix of elements that influence fire combustion and behavior in the “natural” landscape. Weather, topography and fuels (vegetation) are the primary elements of the fire behavior triangle which is a large focus of her book, but she also includes broader topics of fire seasons, ignitions, mitigation, effects and regimes as a means to unfold the complexities and deeper understanding of fire. ​ Each chapter of the book is available in a free PDF format that can be printed only for individual educational use. check out the full guide responding to SIGHTLINES I use artwork to express my feelings and connections to the world, while I create illustrations to understand and communicate information. Most importantly, I use a nature journaling practice to develop better observation skills, awareness, and understanding of the natural world around me. Weather, topography, and fuels are key focus areas for most of my journaling practices. explore pyrosketchology Various observational exercises, visual journaling prompts and sketching tips are available through Miriam's downloadable illustrated guide. Below are two found in found in Chapter 4: Fire Fuels. Leaf Flammability Burn Test An exercise you can use to compare moisture levels and flammability of live and dead fine fuels and or a mix of dead fine fuels in shaded and sunny areas is to gather several different leaves and do a flammability test. Make sure to do this exercise in an area cleared of all vegetation, on pavement, or in a classroom or laboratory setting. You should also have a bucket or container of water to drop the flaming leaves. I recommend using wooden matches and not a lighter or paper matches to provide a reasonable ignition source and test period. You should also have a stop watch and may want to have a a video camera on a tripod to record and observe the flame-lengths after you have observed and timed the ignition. The intent of the exercise is not burn the entire leaf, but to observe the differences between them. Step 1: Trace or sketch the outline of the leaf shape in your journal, but do not color it in. Step 2: Start the timer and video camera. Hold a match to the side of the leaf, until it ignites or for the extent that the match lasts. Observe how well each ignites and burns. Step 3: Record the timing it takes to ignite and burn and add the data next to the leaf outline in your journal. Add any other notes about flames and smoke. Step 4: Review the video and add any more observations missed during the test. Step 5: Sketch the approximate flames onto the leaf shape in your journal and color in the remaining leaf with any charred or unburned areas, showing color and texture differences. Tree Canopy Cover Observations For this observation, you need to look straight up between a group of trees that best represents the overall canopy cover in the area. In a tall forest, you may be able to use an empty toilet paper or paper towel roll to help focus your perspective. You could also create a stencil cutout from a piece of paper or put a circle on a clear piece of plastic. You should ideally take several measurements and obtain an average for the area. Use the canopy cover percentage and or associated descriptive term from the graphic. Sketch a small circle in your journal and use dots to represent the concentration of canopy cover. You can sketch the canopy cover by filling in the leaves, branches and tree trunks, if you’d like something more detailed. Don’t forget to add the percentage and descriptive term on or next to your diagram or sketch. Add additional notes and or measurements about the distance between tree canopies to build a sense of how a fire could move from one tree to another. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Liz Toohey-Wiese Vancouver BC Liz Toohey-Wiese is a settler artist residing on the homelands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and sə̓lílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. She is a graduate from the MFA program at NSCAD University. She completed her undergraduate degree in painting at Emily Carr University, also undertaking coursework at the University of Victoria and the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. She has taken part in solo and group shows across Canada, and recently was the artist in residence at the Sointula Art Shed (2019), the Caetani Cultural Center (2020/21), Island Mountain Arts (2021) and upcoming Similkameen Artist Residency (2022). Deeply interested in the history of landscape painting, her paintings explore contemporary relationships between identity and place. Her most recent work explores the complicated topic of wildfires and their connections to tourism, economy, grief, and renewal. She is a full time Fine Arts faculty member at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, BC. featured artwork Billboard installed outside of Vernon, BC from August 2020 - March 2021 responding to Ground Truths Landscape art has long been used as a form of truth-making, influenced by the stories humans are telling themselves at that particular moment about the environment around them. My practice has remained curious about the history I find myself in conversation with as a Canadian landscape painter, and has attempted to look at ways to undermine the myth of the Canadian landscape as a site of vast, untouched wilderness. ​ My wildfire paintings attempt to grapple with the repercussions of our direct influence on our forest landscapes: the increased prevalence and severity of fire on the landscape is happening because of decades of colonial forest management practices, and the warming of the planet through climate change. What if, instead of looking away from this reality, we stare directly at the changes that are happening right now, accept and grieve the losses we are experiencing, and find the renewal that is happening amidst the destruction? more from Liz's perspective ... Liz Toohey-Wiese walking around the White Rock Lake fire in 2022, not far from where her billboard was installed the year prior. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Gerard Sarnat Portola Valley, CA Poet-aphorist Gerard Sarnat is widely and internationally published. He has been nominated for a Science Fiction Poetry Association Dwarf Star Award, won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest/Poetry in Arts First Place Award/Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for handfuls of Pushcarts and Best of Net Awards. Gerry is widely published in academic-related journals (e.g., University Chicago, Stanford, Oberlin, Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Pomona, Johns Hopkins, Wesleyan, University of San Francisco ) plus national (e.g., Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, MiPOesias, American Journal Of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Free State Review, Poetry Circle, Poets And War, Cliterature, Qommunicate, Indolent Books, Pandemonium Press, Texas Review, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review and The New York Times) and international publications (e.g., Review Berlin and New Ulster ). He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). He is a Harvard College Medical School-trained physician who has built and staffed clinics for the disenfranchised, a professor at Stanford and a healthcare CEO. Currently he devotes his energy/resources regarding climate-justice by serving on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with his progeny consisting of four collections (Homeless Chronicles: From Abraham To Burning Man, Disputes, 17s, Melting Ice King ) plus three kids/six grandsons — and looks forward to potential future granddaughters. featured work Not So Wide Or Hard-Hitting Home-Hardening ​ Town Center organized an Earth Day symposium On how to mitigate fire risks In forest-rich Northern California Portola Valley. I’m impressed & overwhelmed With expert gung-ho-ness DIY Preparedness Panel Neighbors spending $75K easy. TMI sesh, which sadly was attended on Zoom by 7 Includes few presenters/looks like Less than 5 in-person, clearly didn’t reach masses. At end when wrapping up, emcee Who didn’t seem to mean or appreciate her humor Queries, Any burning questions? Man asks if large animals evac’ed to Cow Palace. (Slide said to be borrowed from City of Beverly Hills) responding to SIGHTLINES My hybrid piece dwells on our local difficulty in dumbing-down actions so they are practical for wide-scale, strong-as-the-weakest-community-link implementation and includes an image with sightlines for wildfire resistance. more from Gerard's perspective These are a variety of indoor and outside sightlines from Gerry's Northern California home on 2.3 acres in a wild oak forest. His family's fire risk is very high: the local fire chief, who inspects the property every few years, says fire's approach is a matter of WHEN and not IF so they are mindful to prepare the landscape nearby. Chat back to exhibition Chat

Stories of Fire Integrative Informal STEM Learning Through Participatory Narratives Teresa Cavazos Cohn, Erin James, Leda Kobziar, Jennifer Ladino, Kayla Bordelon, Jack Kredell, Jenny Wolf funded by the National Science Foundation Constructing fire board models of wildfire scenarios with students in the Stories of Fire project. Stories of Fire is an interdisciplinary project that explores personal narratives of wildland fire and informal STEM learning in rural Idaho. The American West is rife with personal narratives of evacuation, smoke, disaster. Yet alongside these dramatic events and the deep, powerful emotions that come with them, fire scientists carry a quieter but no less important message: fire has always been a part of the western landscape, many wildland fires play natural and beneficial roles, and in a warming world we must learn to live with more fire. Indeed, prescribed burns — set intentionally by fire managers — are a critical management tactic. ​ Rather than dichotomizing “fire as terror” and “fire as tool,” we explore narrative as a means of integrating the deep emotion of lived experience with fire science to support a better, more holistic, understanding of wildfire in Idaho. Bringing together a science communicator, a narratologist, a fire ecologist, and a specialist on emotions and public lands, our interdisciplinary research team explores: ​ 1. What characteristics of narrative inform fire science communication, and 2. What audience-centered approaches best support participant narratives in informal STEM learning? ​ Our team works collaboratively with informal educators based in rural areas of Idaho, including the Sawtooth Interpretive Center, Ponderosa State Park, Celebration Park, the McCall Outdooor Science School, and Craters of the Moon National Monument. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2006101. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. ​ Learn more about the project . Next

ARTISTS-IN-FIRE Frequently Asked Questions ​ Do I need previous experience with fire? No. Do I need to do the training before I apply? No. ​ I’m not a resident of Idaho, Oregon or Washington. Can I still apply? For this inaugural residency, we are prioritizing artists and writers living or working in these states or adjacent regions. If your state, province or tribal nation is within or borders Idaho, Oregon or Washington, you are eligible. We look forward to hearing from you. ​ My creative work is not about fire. Can I still apply for the residency? While a demonstrated interest in social and/or ecological issues will be helpful, you do NOT need to have made previous creative work about fire to apply for the residency. You WILL need to explain through the application questions WHY you are interested in experiencing prescribed fire and HOW you see it impacting future creative work. My creative practice is more interdisciplinary. What kind of work samples should I apply with? Up to 5 samples of creative work will be reviewed by jurors no matter how many ways you label yourself or your practice. When submitting samples, you are welcome to submit any mix of files including images, .pdf documents, sound clips, short video clips (web-links are preferred), etc. If you have further questions, please contact us. ​ How do I prepare for the on-the-ground training? Residency participants will complete approximately 40 hours of online training at their own pace but prior to attending the prescribed fire training module. Physical training for the arduous pack test may also be helpful. I’m slightly overwhelmed with understanding the training involved. Can you help me sort it out? Two phases of training are involved in this residency: the first is online and the second is an immersive, on-the-ground prescribed fire training. The online training can be done at your own pace but MUST BE COMPLETED BEFORE the on-the-ground, prescribed-fire-training module and NO LATER THAN MAY 1, 2024. On-the-ground module dates are determined by the Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) organizers. In the Pacific Northwest they generally take place in the spring and fall of each year. And don’t worry! The Confluence Lab will host a training orientation via Zoom for selected participants and be available to guide them through this process. How much time will I need to devote to training? Residency participants will complete approximately 40 hours of online training at their own pace but prior to attending the prescribed fire training module. Physical training for the arduous pack test may also be helpful. The on-the-ground training is immersive and runs from 7 to 12 days depending on the TREX module. PARTICIPANTS MUST BE WILLING AND ABLE TO ATTEND A FULL TREX MODULE. Does this residency provide studio space? No. Since the main goal for this residency is that your creative work finds its way out into your local community, we want you to have the ability to return and/or create in locations of your choosing. Will I be required to travel as part of this residency? Yes. Recipients must be willing to attend a full TREX module and will be responsible for arranging their own travel to and from that module. A portion of funding awarded to participants is meant to help cover cost acquired through this travel. ​ I have some ideas of how I might connect with my community after this residency, but don’t know yet when and where that will happen. Can I still apply? Yes. We expect applicants to have put thought into how they would like to share their experience with their communities, but do not expect that all of the details of that to be resolved before applying. The experience itself may influence how and what you share. Our lab understands that this will take time and can help advise you in this process in the future as needed. I don’t intend to work as a firefighter beyond this residency. Can I still apply? Yes. There is no requirement that you become a professional wildland firefighter, though you would be qualified. And you may find that you want to keep participating in prescribed burns as a volunteer! I already have experience with TREX training. Can I apply to just get funding for my creative practice through AIF? The AIF residency is intended specifically for artists and writers to experience prescribed fire. While previous experience with fire will not disqualify you, recipients will be expected to attend a TREX module and priority will be given to those who would not otherwise be able to have this experience. What if my creative reflection takes longer than 6 months? We understand that your creative processing and reflection may take longer than 6 months, BUT we ask that you share some portion of your creative reflections, even if still in process, with your home community within 6 months of your TREX experience. Once I return home, how much time am I expected to devote to this project? The time devoted will vary from participant to participant. You will be expected to write a creative blog post to shared through the Confluence Lab website within one month of participation and to share your experience through your creative practice with your home community within six months of participation. Will I be at the TREX with all the other AIF residents? No. There may be more than one AIF resident but the whole cohort will not attend the same TREX. The Confluence Lab will work with selected participants to find the TREX that works best for them and for TREX organizers. How much does the training cost? There is no fee for the online training. Most TREX modules charge a participation fee of $300 but these fees will be covered for AIF participants (up to $300). A few TREX charge more, depending on their location, accommodations, and length of module. Participants will be responsible for arranging their own travel to and from the TREX module. The Confluence Lab will help participants find the TREX that works best for them. ​ PLEASE NOTE: As required by TREX organizers, participants will be required to maintain their o wn medical insurance during the TREX module. They will also be required to liability waivers with the University of Idaho and TREX organizers prior to participation. For more clarification, please contact theconfluencelab@gmail.com Next

featured artist Enid Smith Becker Bellevue, WA Enid Smith Becker lives and works in the Seattle area. Inspired by the complex dynamic between humans and the surrounding world, her paintings remind us of how our interactions with nature can transform ourselves and the land. Enid studied art at the University of Washington and has taught art in secondary school. Her paintings are in numerous collections around the US and abroad. ​ In her work for this show, Enid presents a fluid, multifaceted experience that mirrors our own interactions with place and time as we frame our experiences through the screen of a mobile device. The sharp edges of the planes within the painting represent the human influence on the land. The layering of multiple perspectives invites the viewer to see the world through shifting lenses of time, scale, and space. The work is painted in acrylic on canvas. featured artwork "Witness" acrylic on canvas, 30in x 48in, created in response to the Maple fire that burned on the Olympic peninsula in 2018 responding to Ground Truths Witness was created in response to the Maple fire that burned on the Olympic peninsula in 2018. This is a painting of contrasts- the contrast of the organic of the old growth forest and the sharp cut edges of the windows of fire (representing the human impact), the contrast of the cool green of the woods and the hot orange of the fire. If ground truthing establishes the veracity of a map, I see my painting as a verification of reality -a kind of map that asserts the veracity of climate change. Like all my paintings, there is an intentional beauty in the depiction of the natural space in order to draw the viewer in. But the beauty of the old growth forest is broken by the windows of fire. A reminder of what has happened and what will happen if we don't work to protect our natural world. The painting presents a kind of ground truthing for the future- both a warning and an admonition. As a native Washingtonian almost all of my paintings are inspired by the pacific northwest. It's a place I know well and love. I spend a lot of time outdoors. The places I explore and the photos I take are the starting point for my paintings. Within each painting the windows I create tell a story about the place be it a change of season, a new perspective or an event such as a wildfire. more from Enid's perspective Salish Tides, acrylic on canvas, 48in x 72in The Salish Sea, Hood Canal, is a place Enid often goes. Her one room cabin is surrounded by old growth forest. The beach view is the one you see here. It was also from this perspective that Enid watched the Maple fire burn on the Olympic peninsula in 2018, inspiring the painting, Witness. Spring Stream, acrylic on canvas, 24in x 48in This work is inspired by an area that Enid hikes through, just east of Seattle. As is often the case in Enid’s paintings, the sharp edges of the frames within the image represent the human view and action upon the land. Winter Woods , acrylic on canvas, 48in x 72in Enid painted this work a year ago, inspired by a winter storm and how snow drains color from the land it covers. The trunks of the Douglas firs are brown and their branches are dark green, but the effect is one of a black and white landscape. Brighter Haze , acrylic on canvas, 30in x 40in This painting was inspired by the song “Brighter Haze,” written by Enid’s friend, the singer songwriter Kristin Chambers. Chambers wrote it while watching the color of the sky change during a forest fire. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Mary Vanek Smith Eagle, ID Mary Vanek Smith came to painting later in life, inspired by the landscapes of the ranch in Ola, Idaho. Her stunning oils and watercolors are an examination of the quiet power of nature. Smith has studied with Idaho artists Fred Choate and Geoff Krueger. Her work has been featured at Eagle City Hall, St. Luke's hospital, the Nampa Outdoor Festival for the Arts and Eagle Life magazine. Smith says for her, nature gives us a window into the sublime and that a successful painting "speaks to everyone's desire for connection and meaning in life." featured artwork "Sky on Fire" oil on canvas, 11in x 14in responding to Ground Truths My life living in Boise and on a ranch in rural Idaho inspired my art. I came to painting later in life, because I wanted to express the peace and tranquility I found in nature. My art cannot be separated from Idaho; it is as much the creator of these paintings as I am. So often on our ranch in Ola, we would experience the fires we were reading about through these stunning sunsets. We could smell the smoke in the air and we knew this beautiful natural display represented hundreds of thousands of acres of forest being burned. more from Mary's perspective ... an inspirational view close to Mary Vanek Smith's home Mary Vanek Smith's studio space Mary Vanek Smith's works in progress, 2023 Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Justin Webb Boise, ID photo credit: Emerson Soule with Webb's turn of the century 5" x 7" field camera Justin Webb is a photographer from Boise, ID. He holds a BFA in Visual Studies from Boise State University, where he focused on photography. Justin often works with black and white film, which he believes emphasizes the narrative aspect of each image. Most of Justin’s work is recorded through analog photography using 35mm or 120mm film or his 5” x 7” large-format field camera, although he also records with digital from time to time. Justin develops and prints his film himself, and through this process imparts a level of intimacy and passion into his work. Justin’s art is often about the impacts on our natural environment, both natural and human-caused. He currently spends much of his time documenting and photography these impacts in various places throughout Idaho. featured artwork "Skeletons of Soda Fire 2" Silver Gelatin Print using Ilford glossy RC paper, 5in x 7in, 2021 "Skeletons of Soda Fire 1" Silver Gelatin Print using Ilford glossy RC paper, 5in x 7in, 2021 responding to Ground Truths These photos where captured in 2021 in Southwest Idaho; they show the impact on the sage brush and trees killed by the Soda Fire in 2015. I wanted to show the changes to the environment and its personal impact on me, seeing a landscape I grew up exploring stripped of its already limited plant life. These images also relate to the years I spent fighting wildfires in Oregon and Idaho, watching how wildfires have impacted deserts and forests throughout the Pacific Northwest and how their scale and severity is increasing as the climate gets dryer. more from Justin's perspective Personified Camera : Justin took this image while he was photographing the progress of grass growth in an area that the BLM had seed drilled. Justin engages with his home landscape through the lenses of his cameras. Backburn 2006 : Justin took this photo while performing a back burn on fire near FlintCreek located on the Idaho/Oregon border in 2006. Justin finds much of his creativity in the space between his current journey and his past experiences, which he reflects on as his guide. Passing Tree : This image was taken after Justin shot “Soda Fire 2.” He was walking back to his gear before heading to another location. Chat back to exhibition Chat

featured artist Megan Hatch Portland, OR Megan Hatch is a queer, multidisciplinary artist living in Portland, OR. She uses art-making to explore the world around and inside of her, and also to share the stories of those journeys. She does this because she knows, deep down, that art is essential to our collective thriving: it’s how we’re going to find our way. ​ You can find more of her work here . featured artwork "the way isn't clear - and yet here we are" archival pigment print, 27in x 10in, 2022 "almost there - losing ground" archival pigment print, 10in x 27in, 2022 "leaning in - falling down" archival pigment print, 10in x 27in, 2022 responding to Ground Truths The earth is burning, and not in a Paris sort of way. We’re told to lean in, only to find ourselves constantly leaning down to pick up the pieces. Losing ground, falling down….We fall in, call in, reach out and sometimes shout with joy. We mend the cracks with the gold we have, and that we are, so we can carry water and each other. I started this work in 2020, which had the worst fire season in Oregon to date. That year also marked the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and George Floyd died at the hands of police. The experience of each of these tragedies was inextricably linked. So much felt broken. So much still does. In this series, the photographs are bound together by a thin golden line as if by kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with gold. They become a series of vessels to hold our hurt and our hope. There is healing to be found in holding multiple truths in our awareness at the same time, in acknowledging the fullness of the moment, and of each other. By doing so, we get to practice wholeness. There is no way to where we want to go without practice. This is my ground truth… The photographs in this series were made on land across the street from where I live in Portland, OR. Once a landfill, it is now an essential urban greenway for wildlife. It has been burned by wildfire twice in the past three years. more of Megan's perspective Ground truth 2: Watching the smoke roll across the land. This photo was taken during the 2020 Oregon fire season, which was one of the worst to date. Ground truth 1: Nearly all of the photos from the series "yes | and" were made on land that is home to Dharma Rain Zen Center . This area was originally a landfill. It is now an essential urban greenway for wildlife. Megan walks there almost every day. Ground truth 3: The land here gets parched every summer now. Brush fires can and do start easily. Living in an area of town with sparse tree cover exacerbates this, among many other detrimental impacts . This year Megan's family is adding several trees and shrubs along the street by their house. They are also amending the soil with biochar, which both increases soil health and sequesters carbon. Chat back to exhibition Chat

Doug Tolman Salt Lake City, UT Alec Bang Salt Lake City, UT featured artists Doug Tolman is an interdisciplinary artist and place-learner practicing in Great Salt Lake and Colorado River Watersheds. He believes inquiry and dialectic are our strongest tools for solving the West’s socio-ecological problems. He is a recent graduate of the University of Utah MFA program where he received the Frankenthaler Climate Art Award, a Global Change and Sustainability Center Fellowship, and a College of Fine Arts Research Excellence Fellowship. Residing in the space between sculpture, image, and community work, his practice is informed by place-based youth education, ecological science, and biomechanical travel. The materials and imagery he works with come from burn scars, floodplains, lakebeds, and lava flows, places where geologic and anthropogenic time are in constant dialogue. His collecting process is rooted in multi-generational rockhounding and wood carving, which he now employs to deepen and reflect on a complex relationship with the land he calls home. By facilitating generative spaces of inquiry, he attempts to deepen his community’s sense of place in pursuit of solutions to climate and land-use challenges. ​ Alec Bang is an artist, designer and musician living and working on unceded Ute, Paiute, Goshute and Western Shoshone land. He graduated from the University of Utah with a BFA in Sculpture Intermedia and has lived in Panama City, New York, Seattle and Salt Lake City. Alec recently decided to return home to Utah to be closer to family and this has allowed him a resurgence of place-based art, performance and community event production. Through art and performance he seeks to deepen connections with the Utah landscape, historically taken through broken treaties and treated as a landfill for the military/industrial complex. Alec works to find a bridge between heritage and history to understand the politics and environmental impacts of land use in the American West. featured artwork Doug Tolman & Alec Bang Response and Responsibility film and resulting barbed wire & dining set, 2019 ​ Doug Tolman Serotiny coniferous log, splitting maul, 2023 responding to SIGHTLINES Doug is a descendant of LDS Pioneers on land stolen from Ute, Goshute, Shoshone, and Paiute people, just downwind from Pacific Northwest firesheds. His ancestors migrated here fleeing persecution and poverty, but in their self-righteous belief that they were the “chosen people”, displaced and killed many people who belong to this land. He has an immense amount of guilt in being here, but simultaneously feels a deep connection to this place that has grown over seven generations of living close to the land. His childhood memories are rich with camping trips, wood carving, hiking, gardening and rockhounding with his family, experiences that have allowed his relationship with his home bioregion to grow deep. His practice lies within the nuances of a complicated multi-generational land relationship, attempting to learn how his presence can benefit the land, water, air, and community that sustain him. Doug's sculptural work, Serotiny , features a refurbished family maul splitting through a conifer log that was cut down after a prescribed burn in the headwaters of Bear River, the largest tributary of my home watershed. While prescribed burns here in the high desert typically just manage ladder fuels, this burn sectioned off 913 acres in which all the conifers were incinerated. The stands of trembling aspen (Populus tremuloides, a species claiming world’s heaviest organism) left behind are now abundant with new growth. The maul head, manufactured in 1910 was inherited from his great-grandparents the next basin over. It sat as a handle-less antique for decades before it was refurbished and heat-treated much like neighboring forests. A Dictionary of Ecology defines serotiny as “the retention of seeds in pods or cones on the tree, often for many years, until a disaster, most commonly the heat of a fire, causes their release. After fire, the seeds fall on ground fertilized by ash in a site cleared of competitors” (Allaby, 2010). In Western industrial society, we are just learning to burn forests by prescription, something Indigenous cultures have been doing for millennia. This work asks what processes, such as serotiny, are being stunted by industrialization, are being left out of land care? A tool of bifurcation and colonization, barbed wire has segmented land into pasture in the West for several centuries. The Canyon Mountains, located in Sevier River Watershed, are primarily public land, and leased for (over)grazing to several local ranchers. Like many areas of public land in the West, management agencies segment grazing allotments with barbed wire fencing that stretches for miles. A dry, high-desert biome, the Canyon Mountains are dotted with Utah Juniper (Juniperus osteosperma) trees, which seem to burst into flame every 20 years. In a particularly large wildfire, 107,000 acres, the whole mountain range was set aflame, with hundreds of miles of barbed-wire fencing along with it. Doug's & Alec's collaborative Response and Responsibility is a performative response to that wildfire, a response to the barbed wire that colonized the West, and a responsibility as settler-descendants to find our roles in unsettling. By sitting at the burning table, Alec acknowledges how his ancestry is deeply tied to colonization and settler ideology of the American West. This work tries to humanize the experience of being complicit in land theft and attempts to show the lack of dialogue with the indigenous populations who have been displaced. more from their perspective A temporary weather station sits near the top of Halfway Hill burn scar to warn downstream residents of flash flood danger. Coastal wildfire smoke drifts into Great Salt Lake basin, mingling with dust particles from a dry lake bed. We are downwind and upstream, with an economy reliant on poor land-use practices that cause ancestral forests to burn and ancient seas to evaporate. A wooden dining set rests in the Clay Hill Burn Scar before being wrapped in barbed wire and incinerated. A Ponderosa Pine, (Pinus ponderosa) scarred by prescription burn. The self-masting limbs and flaking bark are an adaptation that keeps these trees healthy through low-severity fires. Chat back to exhibition Chat

Stories of Fire: online exhibition series As part of our Pacific Northwest Stories of Fire Atlas Project , we're working with the University of Idaho's Prichard Art Gallery , to showcase works by visual artists and designers in the online exhibition series, Stories of Fire . These exhibitions will highlight the manifold ways artists and designers are marking, mapping, engaging and articulating personal and community experiences of wildfire in the region. Organized into three parts, GROUND TRUTHS (Spring 2023), FUEL LOADING (Fall 2023) and SIGHTLINES (Winter 2024), each exhibition is loosely framed by a particular disciplinary lens— cartography, fire management and urban planning—and the range of ways artists express and explore parallel concerns. on view now Stories of Fire Participating Artists Laura Ahola-Young Jean Arnold Anne Acker-Mathieu Jackie Barry ​ David Paul Bayles & Frederick J Swanson ​ Karin Bolender / Rural Alchemy Workshop ​ Lisa Cristinzo ​ Megan Davis Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes: Overlook Field School ​ Margo Geddes Kelsey Grafton Megan Hatch Alice, Maggie & Rob Keffe Katie Kehoe Kate Lund ​ Amiko Matsu + Brad Monsma ​ aj miccio ​ Miriam H Morrill ​ Julie Mortimer Allison McClay Meredith Ojala Eric Ondina ​ Oregon Episcopal School & Sophia Hatzikos Asante Riverwind ​ Andreas Rutkauskas Gerard Sarnat Martina Shenal Enid Smith Becker Sonia Sobrino Ralston Siri Stensberg Liz Toohey-Wiese Mary Vanek Smith Doug Tolman & Alec Bang Justin Webb Sasha Michelle White Suze Woolf Next

Stories of Fire On line Exhibition Ser ies Part II I : “The future is always in the present.” Sonia Sobrino Ralston ​ “... by looking at a few horizons, we can imagine a multitude of futures.” Emily Schlickman + Brett Milligan Fire is transformative. While wildfires may elicit fear and loss, they also clear the way for new growth. In fire-prone ecosystems, fire renews the growth of grasses and shrubs, and triggers trees with serotinous cones to drop their mature seeds onto nutrient-rich mineral soils. In human communities, fire enables new sightlines to emerge as new ways of seeing and feeling become visible in its aftermath. Resilience, humility, relief, and compassion may sprout as communities in post-fire landscapes sift through what was lost, what was changed, and what was gained. ​ This third and final part of the Stories of Fire online exhibition series features creative and collaborative work that engages the concept of sightlines by envisioning speculative futures that might help us live better with fire. These works explore emotional and material resilience by beginning to reimagine human and other-than-human relationships with fire across the American West. They provoke attention to the opportunities that are “ripened” by fire, asking who and what needs to be made visible and what processes and networks, both ecological and social, need to be supported. They invite our engagement and hold open the questions of how we will choose to live with fire and with each other and what justice could look like across these fire-prone landscapes. This work is presented in collaboration by: And made possible by the generous support of: Emily Schlickman + Brett Milligan Pyro Postcards ​ Greetings from your PYRO FUTURE postcard reversed side text: Given thousands of years of collective human experience with fire, we know we are not separable from it. It has remade us, and we have remade it, based on how we engage it. In gleaning from the past, we can see just how different human relationships with fire can be, and how conseq uential and formati ve these differences are for landscapes. Landscapes change elastically and responsively to fire. Any relationships we now make with fire will still bear a heavy imprint of our agency, which is why design by and with fire is so important. We h ave, and always have had so much choice in what nascent, fiery landscapes can be. Pyro Postcards feature unique text on their backside. Read more from this series here . Jackie Barry 1. Boys in Truck 2 . Medio Fire 3. Cole , 35mm film shot on Olympus Stylus Epic, 2020 ​ Sightlines "bears witness... sparking a range of emotions about what becomes visible, and felt, when the flames are extinguished." read more on how these artists act as agential partners in our shifting landscape Allison McClay Olallie Burns , acrylic on wood, 20"x16" 2022 Kasia Ozga RE_MOVE N.22 batik, ink & watercolor on handmade paper , 2020 ​ "Fire’s ashes are seedbeds for necessary new growth." read more considerations of just futures expressed in Sightlines . Andreas Rutkauskas from the series Silent Witnesses 1. Nk’Mip Fire , 30"x40" 2. Underdown Creek Fire, 40"x30" 3 . McDougall Creek Fire, 30"x40" inkjet prints on baryta mounted on dibond, 2023 Explore Pyrosketchology ​ Miriam H Morrill developed Pyrosketchology as an approach for building awareness of the fire environment through observations, sketching, and nature journaling practices. Her fire environment observations are threaded throughout this guide to dev eloping a deeper sense of place which includes fire. read more Chat Katie Kehoe Wildfire Shelters for Small Animals 35.66754°N, 105.43550°W, Santa Fe National Forest, NM, photographic documentation of site-specific installation, 2023 Gerard Sarnat poem & accompanying screenshot image Not So Wide Or Hard-Hitting Home-Hardening ​ Town Center organized an Earth Day symposium On how to mitigate fire risks In forest-rich Northern California Portola Valley. I’m impressed & overwhelmed With expert gung-ho-ness DIY Preparedness Panel Neighbors spending $75K easy. TMI sesh, which sadly was attended on Zoom by 7 Includes few presenters/looks like Less than 5 in-person, clearly didn’t reach masses. At end when wrapping up, emcee Who didn’t seem to mean or appreciate her humor Queries, Any burning questions? Man asks if large animals evac’ed to Cow Palace. (Slide said to be borrowed from City of Beverly Hills) Doug Tolman & Alec Bang Response and Responsibility, above: film still right: performance artifacts, barbed wire, dining set, 2019 Doug Tolman Serotiny coniferous log, splitting maul, 2023 "Like a serotinous cone opened by fire’s heat, Sightlines releases a range of aesthetic and affective seeds: new ways to visualize, reimagine, and feel [our] way into possible fiery futures and our potential role in making them. " read more about Sightlines affect through Jennifer Ladino's juror's essay Allison McClay Sucia Saves Us a crylic on wood, 20"x16" 2022 Kasia Ozga RE_MOVE N.24 batik, ink & watercolor on handmade paper , 2020 ​ Fire Resilience Workshop Design Collaboration ​ Two years after the Almeda Fire in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, local community leaders mapped their hopes for their county in a Confluence Lab led Fire Resilience Workshop. Designer Megan Davis then partnered with these groups to adapt their concepts into these featured shareable assets. read more Chat Sonia Sobrino Ralston Forests as Data Governance digital animation & collage, 1920x1080px, various digital collage sizes, 2023 Andreas Rutkauskas from the series Silent Witnesses, McDougall Creek Fire 40"x50", i nkjet print on baryta mounted on dibond, 2023 further considerations "The Future is Patchy" Sightlines , the third and final exhibition in our Stories of Fire series, builds on the themes of Ground Truths and Fuel Loadings , adding new dimensions to art’s ability to represent “fire’s mercurial nature as well as the rich range of emotions that fire can produce .” Sightlines envisions what Pyro Postcards creators Emily Schlickman and Brett Milligan emphasize is a “multitude of futures”: some are “bleak. Some are exciting. Some are just fucking weird and stick in your mind.” Any of this multitude could come to fruition depending on how creatively we navigate the climate crisis, how honestly we reckon with injustice, and how successfully we learn to live with more fire. The Sightlines exhibition grapples with the reality that, as one of the more unsettling pieces in Pyro Postcards reads, “the future is patchy.” Like a serotinous cone opened by fire’s heat, Sightlines releases a range of aesthetic and affective “seeds”: new ways to visualize, reimagine, and, to cite Schlickman and Milligan’s artists’ statement, “feel [our] way into possible fiery futures and our potential role in making them.” With a palette of earthy colors that echo historical public lands promotional materials and PSAs, Pyro Postcards operates in unusual and sometimes startling affective registers. Some postcards invoke nostalgia for familiar images and aesthetics with playful reinvention of what we think we know; others traffic in more ominous tones that conjure but defamiliarize the dominant fear-and-dread mode of engaging with fire. On the playful end of this spectrum, the artists replace Smokey Bear and his individualistic “Only You” campaign with fresh nonhuman animal faces, shifting to a collective model of fire resilience led by more-than-human community members. (Vote for a new “pyrophilic mascot” here ! ) A savvy squirrel named “Sooty” welcomes other “Pals” to help reseed after fires. Clothed in an official-looking uniform “Grazie the Goat” stands ready to chomp on flammable matter and reduce fire risk. A cougar crew boss with “Pyro” inscribed on their hard hat appears determined to take advantage of the perfect prescribed burn conditions. Like their human counterparts, these critters put safety first; woodpeckers and bobcats alike sport hard hats and Nomex. These “babes in the woods” are not passive victims; they have co-evolved with fire and can teach humans how to live with it. Other postcards take more serious turns: a promotional postcard featuring Giant Sequoia offers tourists the chance to see “earth’s largest dead trees,” and one postcard that seems to be burning from the top down simply warns: “We’re Fucked.” Overall, Pyro Postcards invokes a kind of affective dissonance, asking us to sit with uncomfortable, conflicting, non-cathartic emotions about fire and to harness that dissonance for justice. Kasia Ozga also recognizes the mixed feelings about fire that so many of us carry. In her artist’s statement, Ozga describes being struck by wonder when confronted with the scale of Pacific Northwest forests, where trees dwarf and humble us, reminding us that we’re a tiny part of a vast ecosystem. At the same time, Ozga feels “exhaustion from the intense thick smoke that blankets the region when forest fires are in abundance,” a common embodied reaction to what Lisa Cristinzo , in her artist’s statement for Fuel Loading , calls “the build up, the burn, and the burn out.” Yet Ozga’s work brings me from suffocation to relief and a kind of release. RE_MOVE N.22 draws the eye upward from root system to canopy, from a rich soil-like red clay, to wispy smoke-like tendrils. The texture of the hand-made paper conjures the crispness of burned bark. The perspective is road-like, two throughlines coming closer together, gradually, to simulate motion. A cleverly placed set of binoculars offers itself up as a tool for sharper vision. I feel poised to turn right, with the lines, and face what’s around the corner—our always invisible future. RE_MOVE N.24 is even more viscerally inspiring, with a beating heart at its center, and tree-like branches that are also lung-like, signaling for us to breathe deeply, spread our arms, and trust the ways that new growth post-fire will re-oxygenate our bodies and sustain our lives. Forests as Data Governance , part of Sonia Sobrino Ralston’s more expansive Uncommon Knowledge project, also moves viewers, but taking a digital rather than an organic approach. Ralston’s project responds to a 2022 fire that threatened Google’s first hyperscale data center in The Dalles, Oregon, prompting the use of LIDAR scans to envision and anticipate future threats to digital infrastructure. Ralston adds forests to these pointlouds of data at the site to show how “plants become critical infrastructure, a form of long-term information storage” that requires protection and stewardship. Converting a forest into binary code, Ralston illuminates the motion, beauty, and agency that are easy to miss in more mundane representations of tree life. By turning plants themselves into infrastructure, Ralston highlights their vulnerability as well as their essential role in planning for a healthy future. Like Ozga’s, this work guides our vision in multiple directions: upward, to migratory birds and tree canopies, and downward, by way of an elegantly twirling conifer, to the intricate and enormous root systems that anchor individual trees in place, reminding us there’s often more going on below ground than what we can see above. Real forests are messy places; in Ralston’s deft hands, digital forests become uncanny pixelated versions of the real thing, both defamiliarizing our relationship to the material world and introducing us to magical new materialities, in which trees are information-rich, illuminated, and illuminating. Patchy Kasia Ozga's RE_MOVE N.22 Two ways works form Sightlines reminds us to look up: (left) from Sonia Sobrino Ralston's Forests as Data Governance , (right) from Miriam Morrill's Pyrosketchology At the other end of the representational spectrum from binary code, Miriam Morrill uses analog methods to bring the fire environment to life via a practice she calls pyrosketchology: a unique kind of nature journaling that builds hand-on awareness of fire by using sketching “to develop better observation skills, awareness, and understanding of the natural world.” Pyrosketchology uses simple materials—drawing tools, sketchbooks, human hands—to reveal the complexities of what Morrill calls the fire environment, which includes the traditional components of the fire triangle along with “fire seasons, ignitions, mitigation, effects, and regimes.” Available for free online, the full Pyrosketchology book includes guided activities to invite us into a more intimate relationship with the fire environment—a relationship founded on simultaneously apprehending fire’s visual, emotional, and scientific dimensions. Two activities featured on our site include one for measuring flammability by way of a leaf burn test and another for estimating tree cover in a forest by isolating and sketching a representative section of the canopy. Through generative prompts like these, Morrill’s pyrosketchology renders science and art deeply embodied, intertwined practices and inspires us to be curious as both citizen scientists and citizen artists. Whether through the white spaces on a page, the distance between pixels, the layers of handmade paper, or the tensions between nostalgic, familiar aesthetics and ironic, playful reinventions of them, the art in Sightlines complicates well-worn emotional ruts and opens up other ways of feeling about, and with, fire—including those that are exciting and just fucking weird. Typically, fire feelings are reduced to variants of fear and sadness, and for valid reasons: when apocalyptic orange skies dominate news headlines, our anxieties are stoked; when catastrophic destruction and loss of life result from unfightable wildfires, we grieve. Yet to focus only on fear and sadness oversimplifies the range and complexity of our feelings about fire and can have negative impacts on management: a frightened public might be more prone to support total suppression and to shun the prescribed burning that is essential for healthy fire management. Sightlines encourages a more expansive affective repertoire as we resee and reconsider our “patchy” fire futures. "When the Smoke Clears" Jackie Barry's Cole Sightlines challenges artists to envision what happens when the smoke clears and we are confronted with fire’s impacts on human bodies, landscapes, and the built environment. The exhibition bears witness to these impacts, sparking a range of emotions about what becomes visible, and felt, when the flames are extinguished. What emotions are mirrored back to us in the eyes of wildland firefighters and others facing fire’s front lines? What pressures do we put on younger generations to both symbolize and create a better future? Who and what survives, and might even thrive, in fiery futures? Sightlines artists invite us to learn lessons from fire that might shape not just how we respond to it but also how we anticipate and prepare for it, how we work with fire as an agential partner in a shifting and shared world. ​ Part of a hotshot crew, Jackie Barry took a camera into the field in 2020 to film their fellow crew members. The result is an intimate set of images that challenge us to reckon with, perhaps to justify, what firefighters do: the labor, the risk, and the “burnout.” Many people are aware that firefighters are underpaid and overworked, and that romantic visions of firefighters as akin to war heroes can encourage us to put them in harm’s way unnecessarily. But beyond stereotypical images of urban firefighters—with their red trucks, their fire stations, the highly visible structure fires they extinguish—what is life like when the backcountry is your workplace, when wildland firefighting is your job? Barry’s position as hotshot crew member enabled them to catch their coworkers in casual moments and expose the gritty realism of a very hard job. In Medio Fire , a cluster of hotshots gaze across a valley at smoke on the ridge opposite them. What seems like repose is both warranted (they work excruciatingly long days, sleep on the hard ground, and carry extremely heavy packs) and also probably not repose at all; most likely they’re analyzing fire behavior and strategizing for the next day’s work. This perspective contrasts with the close-ups of the “boys” in Boys in Truck , an image that makes me curious to hear what they’re talking about right then, and to understand more about their day-to-day work lives. Too often we only see fire from afar, on a distant ridge or not at all—a far-off flame front, or billowing smoke columns, or orange skies in a photo next to an alarming headline. Barry’s photographs make fire personal, not by showing flames but by showing us what human bodies that work with fire look and feel like. I feel challenged by Cole ’s close-up stare, and by his slightly downturned lips: Is this worth it? Are you asking too much of us? And what does his unflinching look juxtaposed against a field of sunflowers begin to tell us about this traditionally masculine workplace? What becomes visible when we focus on the people who work in and with fire are questions of justice, then, at root. Allison McClay’s Olallie Burns echoes Medio Fire in that it frames a distant fire from the perspective of a human—and, in McClay’s image, companion animals. Facing fire alongside these figures, we viewers are looking out with them on a landscape that is burning, has burned, will burn. Here we see the familiar red skies and what looks like a lake reflecting that umber hue. What I find most fascinating about this image—aside from the dogs, who outnumber and look up to the human figure—is the hands on hips stance. This can signal frustration, bemusement, determination, or anger. Without a facial expression, it’s hard to tell. But the piece is powerful for the way it shifts attention from figures to background, asking us to reflect on what we see and feel looking across this landscape with this triad of animals in the foreground. As McClay puts it in her artist’s statement, her work implores us to reconsider “what a healthy relationship to destruction and to existential doom could look like.” In Sucia Saves Us McClay recalibrates doomism toward hope. Gently winding tree limbs cradle a harmonious multi-species community of ravens, white-tailed deer, and human children, in a magical realist mood that suggests salvation. Pushing back against depictions of children as emblems of the future or requisite symbols for hope, though, it is Sucia—an island in the San Juans—that “saves us” here. As the Pacific Northwest adapts to longer and more intense fire seasons, McClay’s paintings are refreshing in their indication that “alarm” is only one affective attunement, even when fire is always in the background. Returning us to central tensions in Ground Truths —between mourning and renewal, death and regeneration, destruction and new growth—Andreas Rutkauskas’s Silent Witnesses series refuses to resolve them. Instead, these photographs expertly show how fire’s power is both destructive and restorative, and prompt reflection about what roles humans should play, as witnesses and stewards, in capturing, rerouting, or simply admiring what Ruskauskas describes in his artist’s statement as “fire’s power to sculpt the land.” Rutkauskas’s photographs get at this question, in part, by re-centering plant agencies, using an outdoor strobe light to illuminate what he rightly considers valuable “members of a community.” Rutkauskas’s framing disrupts the common anthropocentric perspective of looking down and out across a burned-over area by positioning a dried-out shrub in the foreground. What first appear to be almost black-and-white shots quickly take on multiple dimensions of color and texture. White tufts of dandelions pop against a blackened forest. Ponderosas are marked by vibrant orange splotches beneath the bark, which shine neon against charred trunks and signal the emergence of new layers of growth. In all three images, the foreground glows, attracting my eye and heart to brightness rather than the threatening sense of dread or the grief that often overwhelms us when confronted with destruction. One thing that becomes visible, and felt, from this vantage point is a sense of near-miss relief: the feeling that things could have been even worse. But what strikes me most is the bright green understory, which brings a spirit of resilience, even joy, to the darkness. smoke clears Andreas Rutkauskas, from Silent Witness Katie Kehoe, Shelters for Small Animals Katie Kehoe’s Wildfire Shelters for Small Animals operates in a similarly dissonant mode. Small animals often imply cuteness or play, but fire shelters are deadly serious. Trained firefighters practice deploying shelters very quickly, with the knowledge that they are last resorts for survival, to be used only when a flame front is overtaking the crew—in other words, when death is imminent. These triangular shelters are arranged so that their tips touch in a kind of wheel, conjuring a “circling the wagons” sense of protection. But who is included in the circle, and who is the implied enemy? How do we protect not only ourselves, but other animals as well, from destruction? What “survival architecture,” to cite Kehoe’s provocative phrase, is required for our hearts? Kehoe’s art asks what “lifesaving devices” we need to develop to survive and perhaps even thrive in uncertain fire futures. They also beg a more basic question: who is the “we”? Why should large mammals—humans in particular—get priority for survival? Kehoe’s shelters, like Pyro Postcard’s “babes in the woods” avoid a sentimental Bambi-ism but nevertheless tap into a profound and common human concern for “small animals,” harnessing that concern for fire awareness. Ultimately, Kehoe’s project, like all of the work in Sightlines , confronts us with the harsh material realities and the “survival architecture” we must create in the face of extreme conditions—individual wildfires, changing fire regimes, and, more broadly, the climate crisis ​ "Just Futures" Sightlines returns to one of Fuel Loading ’s central insights: that fuels build up “not just via ecological accumulation, but also via social tradition and routine.” Sightlines suggests that our ecologies and societies may be so deeply and complexly intertwined that only art can disentangle them and help us see the distinct threads, and their intersections, more accurately. Recognizing that we’re all implicated in the buildup of these social fuels, how might we form new partnerships for justice? What new collaborations might be fertilized in the ashes of wildfires? How does resilience feel, and what practices and modalities—from mapmaking to performance art—might help nurture it? Does justice require a new suite of emotions to kindle and fuel it, and if so, what might that suite include? A sense of humor can be a kind of lifesaving device, a kind of fire shelter for the heart. As the wildland-urban interface (WUI) takes center stage in larger conflagrations, irony and dark humor can remind us of the incongruities in our attempts to integrate prevention into communities. Gerard Sarnat’s ironic treatment of a poorly-attended online fire safety session for residents of the City of Beverly Hills suggests the difficulty of reaching even privileged communities. Sarnat’s alliteration is harsh—hard-hitting home-hardening—but it uses that attention-getting craft technique to alert us to class-based injustice. The poem is structured like an interlocking toolkit, with line lengths that could be assembled like puzzle pieces. The lines of verse mirror the Zoom screenshot’s blocky text, which (if we read it “right”) is red to green, left to right, implying a tidy, simple building block style of home protection that eludes the randomness of fire’s impacts. Anyone who’s seen its impacts will have noticed the way fire jumps around, skipping some structures entirely while demolishing others. Like Kehoe’s small animal shelters, Sarnat’s work questions which protective tools are available to which kinds of animals. Sarnat notes a moment of perhaps unintentional humor—the meeting host asking if there are “any burning questions.” Intentional or not, this gestures toward the multitude of ways that fire rhetoric permeates everyday discourse, shaping material practices alongside attitudes about fire. The audience member’s question about whether large animals are evacuated to “Cow Palace,” a former livestock pavilion converted to an indoor sports arena, warns of a potentially unhealthy use of humor: as a deflection or self-protective mechanism, a way to avoid grappling with the seriousness of wildfire risk. just futures Gerard Sarnat’s zoom screen capture from Doug Tolman and Alec Bang's Response and Responsibilty Megan Davis from Pyro Postcard series Doug Tolman and Alec Bang take direct aim at colonialism, reckoning with injustice at both personal and broader scales. Their short film opens with Bang eating a sandwich and seeming oblivious to his surroundings: the empty place setting across the table, the barbed wire fence to his right. The camera cuts to a scene in which two people roll a bundle of barbed wire (which the artists describe in their statement as “a tool of bifurcation and colonization”) down a hill like a giant tumbleweed. We get a glimpse of them wrapping the table in the wire before cutting to a black screen, when the familiar crackling sound of fire consuming wood reveals that they’ve set the wrapped table ablaze. The artists describe this work as a performative response to an especially large wildfire in their region as well as “a response to the barbed wire that colonized the West, and a responsibility as settler-descendants to find our roles in unsettling.” What’s left of the table is threadbare, barely holding together. A film still looks alarmingly as though Bang is about to be, or has just been, burned over by the flames to his right, conjuring memories of activists using self-immolation to make their points. Sitting face to face with fire, engulfed in smoke and breathing its toxicity in close proximity to the burning table, Bang forces viewers to bear witness and to feel complicit alongside him. Tolman and Bang find inspiration in the concept of serotiny, which they visualize via a family heirloom: a maul with its sharp edge embedded in a conifer, which was cut down after a prescribed burn in Tolman’s home region. Serotiny strikes me as a kind of performative land acknowledgment that recognizes colonial legacies and invites reflection on what reconciliation might look like, both in terms of fire management—recentering Indigenous burn practices and enabling serotiny—and in terms of social justice as well. Megan Davis’s work gives voice and vision to a community trying, collectively, to process the Almeda Fire’s impacts. Davis and other members of the Confluence Lab Stories of Fire team partnered with Coalición Fortaleza and Our Family Farms to host a workshop in 2022 . Lab members brought art supplies and a simple prompt: participants were asked to map their visions for a resilient future. Some teams braided yarn to signify their interwoven community; others created a door using layered paper, signaling a sense of welcome. For Davis, an experienced graphic designer, rendering hand-made images with a professional, design aesthetic allows her to create “unified digital designs” that are impactful and versatile. Working closely with community members to ensure integrity of vision, Davis’s creation of shareable files results in both distinctive artifacts unique to this community, this fire—artifacts that can be posted publicly to amplify community members’ voices—as well as templates that can be repurposed elsewhere. My favorite is an image of a large wave about to crash and overwhelm a tiny sand castle in the corner of the frame. But this impending destruction is not something to be feared. Rather, a small caption reads: “May our needs propel us to break and rebuild the very systems that left us in need in the first place.” This mantra, or prayer, bears repeating. Some structures and systems need to be “burned down” so they can be rebuilt with justice at the center. For settlers, recognizing complicity with land theft, displacement, and repression of Indigenous burning practices is essential. As Indigenous fire practitioners have always known, fire is not necessarily destructive. Fire also cleanses, as Lab member Isabel Marlens reports in her essay “Fire Lines.” Fire’s ashes are seedbeds for necessary new growth. Like a wildfire, art can be a mechanism for “burning down” systems of injustice, clearing space for better futures and providing the seeds to grow toward them. Pyro Postcards exemplifies this creative destruction. Schlickman and Milligan repurpose Smokey’s neoliberal paternalism (“Only You…”) for decolonial ends in a postcard showing California’s tribal borders that implicates viewers in justice, captioned: “Only You Can Decolonize.” Another reads, in bold, all-capped, block letters, “LAND BACK.” Their “Right to Burn Fire Service” postcard speaks to a future where Indigenous burning practices are upheld as a valuable right as well as an ecological good. As we continue to make the future now, moment by moment, day by day, fire season by fire season, we’d do well to find more ways to invite, center, and amplify Indigenous fire knowledge. As a writer, I had hoped Sightlines would help me articulate a sort of conclusion to our three-part exhibition series. It didn’t. Instead, Sightlines leaves me feeling productively unsettled. These artists showcase the power of art to generate visions of futures that will “stick in your mind” for some time, and I’m left with wildly dissonant affective orientations to fire, with no single end game, no clear future, to pin my hopes on. But this lack of resolution doesn’t have to be scary. As Sasha Michelle White puts it, each “wound is an opening ,” an opportunity to see the world more clearly and to rebuild it with new insights, better tools, and sharpened vision. It’s true that the future is an open question. But it’s equally true, as Sonia Sobrino Ralston reminds us, that “the future is always in the present.” Our vision of what comes next may be patchy, but these artists remind us that isn’t a bad thing. A patchy forest can be a sign of a healthy ecosystem, one where fires have been able to do what they’re meant to do: produce a messy mosaic and a resilient natural landscape. Perhaps human-led resilience efforts might be patchy in this positive sense, as we feel our way forward, toward murky but more just fire futures. ​ further considerations contributed by Sightlines Juror Jenn ifer Ladino, February 2024 Next