by When Jeffrey Sugishita visited the burned -out shell of the house in which he had lived, the flames still floated inside. Sugishita wandered through the rubble for about 30 minutes and looked at the empty room in which his room was.
“What is burned is burned,” said the 26-year-old artist. “I said to myself, ‘I’ll make something new out of it.'”
Sugishita went to his car, took out the helmet sculptures he had saved from the fire, and started taking pictures with his iPhone and a tripod.
One of these self-portrait sugar, which stands in the middle of the charred ruins and a flower helmet is now in the center of an art exhibition in Los Angeles, which was opened on Friday and which brings together the work of almost 100 artists who have lost their houses. Studios and life work on historical forest fires in January.
The show for artists who were opened by Wildfire when the gallery was flooded by radiant rains underlines the constant stress of the California extreme weather. Water seeped over the bottom of the gallery, and the workers swept puddles from the door when new emergency warnings had been exhibited, which highlighted the risk of sludge ventilation in recently burned areas in all of Los Angeles.
Some of the artists who have contributed to the new show are known, such as Ruby Neri, Kelly Akashi and Kathryn Andrews, or even like Paul McCarthy, who has been famous in the art world for decades. Others have exhibited their work primarily on site or are starting their career, such as Sugishita, who completed the art school in 2023.
“It felt really necessary to create a context in which people who were driven out in Los Angeles, but who independently put together the show as part of a voluntary effort.
Hundred percent of sales will go to the artists, he said and inspires the name of the show: a hundred percent.
The thread of the exhibition is the common and very recent destruction of the artists. Some of the works on display are those who have thrown the artists into their cars when they fled from the rapidly moving flames.
An Altadena gently touched the broken frame of her photo collage of a contemplative woman who was damaged in her escape from Eaton Canyon Fire.
Since the last month “all of my art has been in my van and Airbnbs,” said Calethia Deconto (44), whose Altadena is still renting, but is so damaged by smoke and soot that it cannot return.
Daniel Mendel-Black showed a digital pressure of a painting that he had only ended in early January and which was burned in the Eaton Fire. The original painting was inspired by topics of social fragmentation and dystopia, he said, and it was strange to reconstruct it. “Many things that I could conceptually talk about are now completely emotionally realized,” he said.
Some artists showed works from the ashes of their houses, such as Ronna Ballister’s series of slightly charred ceramic pots, which the 73-year-old found by digging through the debris of their Altadena house.
For others, their only option was to create something completely new. Howard Goldberg lost almost everything he had made about the Altadena fire, “30 years of art turned to ashes”.
Without home, studio or materials, from place to place, Goldberg has made new work with the last copies of the Los Angeles Times, a relapse to a technique that he previously used. It felt appropriate, he said: “My personal catastrophe is on the front page.” He ordered the letters of the name of the paper into different daily news, among fewer elites, I see the lost signal as if the newspaper itself speaks or even “blabting”, like “an idiot who has to speak further … “.
The artists showed their work in a group show with other artists who had suffered forest fire losses and hoped that the community could be restored by coming together, but also layers of grief and anger.
“Behind each individual of these pieces is a whole story that has disappeared,” said Lou Dillon, 38, whose mother in Malibu, where her family had lived for 70 years, was reduced to charred stones. Dillon and her mother, Victoria Franklin-Dillon, 73, showed her two works of art side by side: the drawing of a view by the mother from her house in Malibu and the painting of the daughter in 2015 from this hill in fire during an earlier Malibu-Blaze.
“This was a disaster of climate change, and we are all responsible for it,” said Camilla Taylor, whose home house in Altadena was destroyed. “We are addicted to convenience, and this convenience costs.”
The heat of the fire that burned her house was so big that “the windows didn’t break, they sagged – they melted,” they said. “I had a collection of marbles. You are now one mass. “
Taylor contributed a sculpture of a blackened figure with a metallic mask that had been stored in a gallery and thus survived. Although Taylor had made the figure in front of the fire, she now reminded her of searching the charcoal of her destroyed home and seeing an occasional metal lane.
“It will come for all of us,” they said. “We have to do it better.”
Many of the artists on the show had stories of dramatic refugees. Vincent Robbins, 87, said he tried to put one of his great paintings in his truck when he was evacuated from the Eaton fire, but the 100 km / h winds took up the canvas and with it. He landed on the driveway with broken ribs and a damaged tooth. The painting had to be left and was burned together with his home. He “lived” in Altadena, said Robbins, now “It’s all powder.”
For the show, Robbins, who lived with his wife in a motel financed by Fema, had a color that was randomly brought when he evacuated. He called it: uncertainty.
Almadus Star, 82, described to be on the roof of his Altadena house, and tried to save him from a tree that was felled by the heavy winds when the strength went out. In the dark, he decided to evacuate and evacuate what he could, including a single precious work of art, a container with an old piece of fabric with a spiritual meaning, which he calls an easy cloth from Altadena. It was, he said, “something I could hold in my hand”. He placed Large from Altadena in the gallery next to a smoke -speed glass container that survived the fire.
Other artists said that the show itself encouraged it to do new works despite the many logistical hurdles of life after a catastrophe.
Shortly before the fire, Mary Anna Pomonis had just exhibited what she thought was the best work in the Alto Beta Beta Gallery of Altadena. Then the gallery burned and everything in it. For a while, said Pomonis, she was worried that she might not be able to work again: “I was afraid that I couldn’t get back from it.” But she worked through the fear and showed a digital copy of one of her lost ones Works of art, paired with brand new works.
Kassia Rico-Yeh, 32, said she was in the emergency room twice last month and dealt with the overlap of asthma, Rauch and Covid. But she had finally managed to end the paintings kept in her studio in the city center of Los Angeles, which was inspired by the afternoon light on the foothills east of Los Angeles. She completed the last details on Tuesday morning, which means that the painting was probably still a little sticky.
At the opening evening of the exhibition, many artist names were simply written with pencil on the walls next to their pieces, and some works were not labeled at all. But when the artists who had contributed to work, wandered through the gallery, some fasting said to their surprise, the hastily-assumed show held well, maybe even better than a typical group show in Los Angeles.
“It is high and low, outsider and insider,” said Molly Terney, whose homeland and studio Altadena were destroyed. “There are many interesting work.”
Moshayedi said the show aimed to be “non-hierarchically” and bring together artists who work inside and outside the commercial art world. “Hopefully the visibility of some artists can help other artists who are in more dangerous shift states,” he said and found that the works on display were between 50 and 50,000 US dollars.
While some of the artists who had contributed to work had lived in areas affected by the Palisades Fire, an area of the Pacific Ocean northwest of the city, the majority came from Altadena, a city that was embedded in the foothills of Los Angeles .
After a relatively affordable increase, Altadena attracted a racist diverse and close -meshed community of creative residents. It is a special loss, said Dekonto, one of the Altadena artists: “If you have found this magical place and this place is completely destroyed”.
The artist Devin True, 49, her partner, said and his neighbors Altadena spent the morning of the Eaton Fire out with garden tubes to protect the houses in their block. When the water ran out in their hoses, they filled buckets from a neighbor’s whirlpool.
Now, with a badly damaged Altadena and the rents that rise after the fires in Los Angeles, “we are not sure where we can afford to live,” said True.
It was clear that many artists said they would find a way to continue to create.
“I start a new life’s work, that’s how I see it,” said Robbins, the 87-year-old artist who has lost his home in Altadena. “We will see what we can do.”
One hundred percent can be seen at 619 N until February 22nd Western Avenue in Los Angeles. It is open from Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.
