Art ON Fire
Thursday, June 16
United States: 10:00am PT, 11:00am MT, 12:00pm CT, 1:00pm ET
EUROPE: 17:00 GMT Australia: 4am AEDT, Thursday
Aviva Rahmani, Michael & Heather Llewellyn, David Paul Bayles, Frederick J Swanson, Sam Hitt
Over 300,000 acres have burned in New Mexico over the last two months, in the Spring no less. In this Zoom event we will hear from members who have created data visualizations made during an artist residency, organized a group exhibition titled Forest Fires addressing wildfires in the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, see photo documentation from a series titled Following Fire that's a collaboration between an artist and scientist visually assessing the Holiday Farm Fire in Oregon, and a guest speaker who is an activist presenting an alternative perspective on the current Hermit's Peak and Calf Canyon Fires in New Mexico.
We will also have a selected group of artists presenting who are addressing wildfires in their work that will participate in the Q&A following including Robin Lasser, Eileen Wold, Bryan David Griffin, and Shawn Skabelund.
Gif above: ©Avivia Rahmani, Projections of Fire, 2021; ©Llewellyn Studio, FOREST⇌FIRE, 2021; ©David Paul Bayles, Fireweed and Charred Western Red Cedar, 2021; ©NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, April 23, 2022.
Presenters
Aviva Rahmani will be presenting her work from an online residency with Arts Cabinet in the UK (2021) where she visualized fire data for her project titled Fire Tigers. Rahmani is recognized as a leader and theorist on ecoart, crossing over the environmental sciences and feminism. She is the co-editor of “Ecoart In Action,” the author of “Divining Chaos” (pub. New Village Press 2022). Currently, she is working on an opera based on “The Blued Trees Symphony” (2015- present), which challenged eminent domain land takings for natural gas pipelines with copyright law. Rahmani has received numerous grants and fellowships and has been exhibited, published, presented, and written about both nationally and internationally. She is an Affiliate with the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado at Boulder; gained her PhD from the University of Plymouth, UK and her BFA and MFA at the California Institute of the Arts, where she double majored in electronic media and electronic music, holding teaching assistantships with Allan Kaprow and Morton Sobotnick. www.avivarahmani.com
Michael & Heather Llewellyn are a collaborative artist duo. For 25 years Michael traveled around the world as an award-winning freelance photographer in the publishing, recording and advertising industries. While on assignment in the recording industry, he met Heather who became his producing partner two years later. Lately, the Llewellyn's have expanded their interests to include designing and creating interpretive public art exhibits, working with non-profit, tribal and government organizations to engage the public in complicated issues facing communities. Projects include: The Future Forest Cycle, 2017 - Present (encompassing the FOREST⇌FIRE Project, The Sagehen Forest Project Portraiture Series & the Future Forest Cultural Trail); Renegade Literati, 2019 - Present; Picture This, 2017-2019; and Image Nation, 2015-2018. Michael and Heather received the 2018 Reserve Artist Naturalist Award from the University of California - Natural Reserve System. forestandfire.org SORRY THEY HAD TO CANCEL
David Paul Bayles and disturbance ecologist Frederick J Swanson will present recent developments in the forest and int their minds for their collaborative project Following Fire: Documenting a Forest's Uncertain Future. In March 2021, they presented their initial impressions from their joint inquiry in the Holiday Farm Fire along the McKenzie River in Oregon where 170,000 acres burned in the fall of 2020. Bayles brings attention to form and color, while Swanson focuses on forest history and physical-ecological processes in the blackened, skeletal forest where the fire laid bare details of a landscape typically obscured by the clutter of foliage. Their long-term art-science project is documenting the stark beauty and profound expression of resilience in the burned forest, and also signals of an uncertain future posed by land use legacies and climate disruption.
Bayles photographs landscapes where the needs of forests and human pursuits often collide, sometimes coexist and occasionally find harmony. Selected publications include Orion, Nature, Audubon, Outside, L.A. Times, and Terrain. Selected public collections include Portland Art Museum, Santa Barbara Art Museum, Harry Ransom Center, Bibliotheque Nationale and Wildling Museum. The David Paul Bayles Photographic Archive was created in 2016 at The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley to archive his entire life’s work. davidpaulbayles.com
Frederick J. Swanson is a retired research geologist with the US Forest Service, who studies forest and stream ecosystems affected by disturbances – logging, floods, volcanic eruptions, wildfire. Since 2000, he has facilitated engagement of writers and artists in the landscapes of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens and ancient forest of the Andrews Experimental Forest as part of the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program, based in the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word. ecologicalreflections
Sam Hitt has been active in conservation issues in the Southwest for nearly 40 years. He founded Elk Mountain Action in the early 1980s to protect old growth forests and in 1989 Forest Guardians (now WildEarth Guardians). He is currently the founder and director of Wild Watershed, a volunteer group working on aquatic conservation in the Southwest. Sam serves as president of the Santa Fe Forest Coalition. Wild Watershed is a member group. santafeforestcoalition.org
Members and one guest are free. Non-members are $10 per person. All participants MUST REGISTER.
