Facing Fire- St. George Art Museum

June – August 2022

Fire as omen and elemental force, as metaphor and searing personal experience—these are the subjects explored in Facing Fire, an exhibition opening June 2022 at the St George Art Museum, an exhibition curated by Douglas McCulloh and UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography. California’s diverse ecologies are fire prone, fire-adapted, even fire-dependent. In the past two decades, however, West Coast wildfires have exploded in scale and severity. There is a powerful consensus that we have entered a new era—nature unbalanced, the end of the stable world. The artists of Facing Fire bring us incendiary work from active fire lines and psychic burn zones. These artists are like poets who enter a burning building and bring back reports of majesty, fear, and flame.

In addition to artists obsessed with the elemental, the exhibition features work by California’s top acknowledged fire photography specialists. Together, they face fire, sift its aftermath, and struggle with its implications. Throughout is the uneasy sense that wildfire is a stand-in, a site of displacement for more immaterial fears, for the amorphous anxieties of the age.