Samantha Fields is a disaster artist. “Disaster, from massive storms and wildfires to political collapse and personal tragedy, fascinates and troubles me.” Fields’ paintings are an inventive update of traditional allegorical landscape painting: ominous vistas and environmental calamities portrayed with a deadpan, analytical accuracy that underlines the fragility of life and the certitude of death and disaster. The wildfire paintings are based on her own photographs. Of late, she says, she can pick and choose among Southern California conflagrations. Some have been close by her own southwest-facing hillside house in the Mount Washington neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Fields presents the viewer with images of mysterious manufacture. “I paint atmosphere with atmosphere,” she says. There is no touch of hand, no texture of paint. She sprays coat after coat of vaporized acrylic paint onto super smooth canvas. “It takes hundreds of layers to create the paintings, which while photographic, deny the accuracy of that medium upon closer inspection.” In the end, the paintings feel as shadowy as the drifting blurs of vapor, smoke, and haze they reference. Their gossamer, ethereal quality invokes the sublime. But the tenuous insubstantiality undermines certainty, questioning the veracity of photography, of memory, of perception itself.

Norma I. Quintana crouches in the white ash of utter destruction. With black- gloved hands, she sifts surviving seared objects from the debris of what had been her Napa home and studio for twenty- eight years.

“It was difficult to register the totality of our loss,” she recollects. “But as I looked closer, I noticed a strange, unexpected beauty in the ashes. I began to recognize objects—a pin, a wristwatch, a statuette of a clown, camera bodies, kitchen tools.” Quintana’s home was destroyed the night of October 8, 2017 by the Atlas Peak Fire. The family had five minutes to flee.

Quintana quickly came to regard the surviving fire fragments not as mere objects, but as containers of memory. She developed a ritual of salvage, survival, and recollection. She placed each recovered remnant of her previous life on the back of a rubber glove employed to comb the wreckage and she used her iPhone X to make photographs. “I have always been a documentarian and a collector, looking, hunting for meaning in my surroundings.” In the ashes, memory becomes meaning, and meaning memory.

Noah Berger admits a fire photography addiction. “I got hooked on the experience of being out here,” he says. “It strips off the mundane layers of life.” When wildfires erupt, Berger disappears for weeks at a time, breathing the smoke, living on the firelines. Berger’s fire photographs earned him a 2019 Pulitzer Prize nomination.

“I have full Nomex, goggles, gloves, and hardhat, of course. I added a pair of really good scanners last year.” He installed a carbon monoxide detector in his Nissan Xterra. A state-of-the-art emergency fire shelter occupies the back seat. In the fire zone, Berger never turns the vehicle off. There might not be enough oxygen to start it again. “Good wildfire fighters really have a passion for wildfire. And if you’re photographing wildfire, you have to have the same thing.”

The San Francisco-based photographer works for national and international news outlets including the Associated Press, Reuters, San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times.

Joan Wulf uses fire to depict fire. The artist’s subject and the studio materials are one and the same. Tongues of smoke capture the flicker of flame, the touch of wind. To portray nature’s most basic states, Wulf has burned, torched, sprayed, oxidized, ripped, crushed, and bent. She has set alight and quenched in water.

Wulf ’s subjects are a roster of basic elements: water, fire, earth, wood, metal. Early on, she pursued representational painting to depict these foundational natural elements. But fire is elusive, hard to capture both in nature and art. One day, out of equal parts invention and frustration, she draped a sheet of paper over the edge of her studio table and lit a beeswax candle. “I went straight to fire itself,” she recounts. “Fire is both the subject and the vehicle, the medium.” That initial result is in this exhibition: Smoke Series 1. Her 2013 experiment led to what Wulf calls, “collaborations with the elements,” releasing the innate qualities of natural elements to imprint images with a sequence of impermanent moments. Such touchless drawing with smoke and fire is known as “fumage.” Unsurprisingly, the Surrealists used the technique to evoke dreams and apparitions, a kind of automatic writing, an elemental form of painting.

Jeff Frost operates along what he calls the “creation–destruction” spectrum. “Contemplation of extinction” is how he characterizes his video-sound piece California on Fire. “A window into the violence we are facing at the hands of the environment we have shaped for ourselves.” The piece is a meditation on destruction and loss. Five chapters are based on the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. (For the first two years of the project, Frost’s working model was more directly violent: Dante’s Inferno—wild storms without rest, billowing black clouds, rivers of boiling blood and fire.) The ultimate form of destruction is that which we inflict on the planet.

The piece was a five-year obsession. Frost took extreme firefighter training and gained full access to more than seventy fires across the state. He came away with thirty terabytes of image and sound and some 350,000 photographs. California on Fire skews time. He uses frame rate distortions and time-lapse sequences to pause or accelerate, releasing flames to spread with consuming speed. Frost mixed the audio track from his own field recordings: dispatch chatter, helicopters overhead, electronic pulses of emergency lights, fire, flame, and wind.

In September 2008, artist Anna Mayer placed a dozen unfired ceramic sculptures into valleys and hillsides along the Malibu coastline. She intended them to be fired by wildfire. They were raw, crumpled, torso-sized slabs inscribed with text. For ten years, the work existed as a proposition, a conceptual gesture. Annually, Mayer posted a set of postcards acknowledging the project. In 2014, she made a series of watercolors to imagine what the ceramics might look like when they came out of the landscape. She lived, she says, “knowing that the work might not fire in my lifetime.”

Malibu is “the wildfire capital of North America and, possibly, the world,” writes social historian Mike Davis. “At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea.” In November 2018, the Woolsey Fire burned 96,000 acres, destroyed 1,643 structures, killed three people—and fired six of Mayer’s sculptural pieces. She recovered four.

The artist identifies multiple themes in the work: the politics of affluent homeowners who build in fire-prone landscapes, “this moment of planetary reckoning,” Ecofeminism, a desire to produce land art on a human time scale, women, desire, “and the act of waiting,” connections to the history of ceramics.