A touring exhibit, currently at Scalehouse Collaborative for the Arts in downtown Bend, creates a ghost forest filled with images of wildfire scars through which visitors can wander.
“It’s digital photography and these are all forests along the west coast from northern Washington to southern California,” Jocelyn Church, a Scalehouse intern, explains while looking at the translucent images suspended from the ceiling by wire. “She does this carbon printing process where she prints the photos onto glass… The carbon that is used is soot from actual forest fires.”
The artist, Sarah Grew, won a LensCulture Critics Choice award in 2022 for Ghost Forest. The bulk of her art studies time, light and climate change. To develop concepts, she immerses herself in a subject such as becoming an artist-in-residence at a recycling facility, a beekeeper and studying plants and participating in a philosophical collegium in Italy.
She’s one of four artists featured in the exhibit, “The Spaciousness of Change,” which examines the impact of climate change shaped by wildfire. The artists’ work involves different interpretations through photographic, sculptural, sound and 2D mixed media installations.
Artists Sandra Honda and Dr. Mei-Ling Lee created “Hands on the Land: Central Oregon Climate Stories.” It features plaster molds of hands from 40 Central Oregonians. Each mold has a QR code that brings up an audio recording of the human associated with the hand. Honda created the molds while Lee recorded the stories. Even though it’s anonymous, listeners learn a lot about each speaker and each story is remarkably unique.
Hand number three has the voice of a woman. “You could feel it,” she says during the two-minute recording. “Especially living in Sisters or where we live, you’re near nature. Just recognizing, ugh, there’s a lot less birds in this tree this year, than there was two years ago. There’s less water in this river. I recently helped start a ritual group, a grief group, for young people and one of the pillars is holding a sacred container so people could express their grief and their anger and their hopelessness, helplessness around the earth.”
Hand number 13 belongs to a man. “We bought Lake Creek Lodge in 2003 and that was the year the B&B Complex Fire burned around the little community of Camp Sherman and that was a real wake-up call because immediately we had to evacuate Camp Sherman,” he says. “As owner of a hospitality business we had to then refund all the deposits people paid that were coming to stay there, so we started out in the hole.”
Hand 20 is that of a young man. “What I try to do here in Central Oregon is…I help around four or five farms taking care of their bees. So, the idea is for my bees to be pollinating this food that all the people in Central Oregon and Bend are eating, kind of completing this food circle. I’m doing this for free.”
Hand 26 belongs to a woman. “I’ve always loved sticks. Here, sticks, rocks, bones are all part of my artwork and now fabric and textiles… With the work I’m doing now, with the small animals, I’ve started using burned manzanita as the antlers and what the fire does is harden that wood, where before it might have been brittle.”
In another part of the exhibit, artist Kathleen Caprario wove tapestry with colors representing biodiversity and fire-retardant cutouts. An acrylic entitled “Living in a Postcard” is made with paint and Whychus Creek silt on slashed and burned canvas.
In another room, visitors are surrounded by acrylic paintings on paper called “Illusion of Infinite Water,” inspired by one of the storytellers from the “Hands of the Land” project. Lee also recorded the sound of single water droplets which is played on a loop, further immersing visitors in the moment.
The artists will give a talk at Scalehouse gallery on Thursday, Aug. 27 at 5:30pm. Registration is online. The exhibit is open to the public through August.
The Spaciousness of Change
Gallery: Wed-Sat 11am-4pm Thru Aug 28
Artist talk: Thu, Aug 27 5:30-7pm
Scalehouse Collaborative for the Arts
550 NW Franklin Ave, Suite 138
scalehouse.org/thespaciousnessofchange
Free
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