California Fever Dreaming

Description

In the summer of 2018, during a period of my rumination about the American West, a large swath of California was burning in what’s come to be an annual Fire Season. The sky above my Oakland studio was thick with smoke and the ground was covered in the ashes of the nearby forests and homes lost to the fires. Moved by this, and the memory of friends who had died in a large fire two years earlier, I re-fabricated a maquette of Ram of the West, the public sculpture I had just completed, powder-coated and embellished it with oil paints, and allowed it to burn in a bonfire. Its current form is painted only in the burnt oil and ash of that fire.