Press Release
Images

Fire is a force both generative and destructive. Historically, it is the maw of primordial sacrifice—fire promises renewal and draws us nearer the sacred even as it transforms, devouring anything unlike itself. Fire’s brightness and its smoke obscure from view the objects that are its fuel. This, even as fire illuminates that which lies outside its reach, making vision possible. Those within it are transformed; those around it bear witness. 🔥, a two-person exhibition featuring new paintings by Michael Handley and Greg Lindquist, explores the competing tensions inherent to fire and their political implications in our contemporary ecological and cultural climate. Handley and Lindquist provide us with purview to wildfires as natural phenomena that interrupt the natural world. Their work presents climate change as still life; the viewer bears witness to the control humanity exerts on atmospheric conditions, and our impact on the natural world. The exhibition will be on view from November 2nd to December 21st, with an opening reception Saturday, November 2nd from 6-8pm. 

Michael Handley presents large-scale abstractions in vibrant reds, ochres, pinks, oranges, and yellows, set against black grounds. His works possess a distressed quality, with textures reminiscent of earthen surfaces—rock formations or wooded landscapes—and vertical movements that suggest abstracted rivers or waterways. These compositional and textural elements place the work in direct dialogue with the natural world, a connection deepened by Handley’s choice of materials, process of embodying wildfire, and the broader environmental concerns driving his practice. 

As he begins each painting, Handley seeks to become wildfire itself, channeling its elemental force to shape the energy of his work. Wildfire retardant supplants paint as the primary medium in Handley’s paintings, expanding on the artist’s ongoing exploration of environmental control and human intervention. This industrial substance, typically deployed by airplanes upon the land to suppress blazes, is applied by Handley directly to his canvases. The result is a compelling interplay between destruction and creation: the devastation that fire leaves behind, the act of controlling it with retardant, and the aesthetic formations that emerge through Handley’s process. 

Handley’s works reflect on the tension between fire’s destructive force and humanity’s efforts to contain it. The black gesso-prepped canvases evoke the charred remnants of scorched earth, while the layered wildfire retardant conjures both literal and symbolic battles between fire and water. Through this approach, Handley prompts broader reflections on the shifting relationship between nature and human intervention, suggesting the idea of nature as separate from humanity—or untouched by it—is an illusion in our contemporary world. 

While Handley’s works inhabit the status of the natural with the materials and processes of fire suppression, Greg Lindquist’s paintings offer a broader ideological critique through narrative imagery, presenting expansive, fire-engulfed viewsheds that pulse with transformative color. He strives to make the invisible forces of ecological and social crises more conspicuous and intelligible, revealing particular beauty that engages and challenges the viewer. His works in 🔥 explore the pathology of wildfires, often framed as symbols of extreme weather. Lindquist’s paintings depict blazing vistas that evoke fire’s contradictory status as both a vaporous, enchanting hyperobject and a devastating force. His work creates this dialectical space, dwelling upon humanity’s conflicted, simultaneous role of causing and ameliorating so-called wild fires. For decades we have rejected controlled burns, a key indigenous practice that hinders uncontrolled spread, and hence have experienced in collusion with climate change more intense wet seasons that accelerate vegetative growth, provisioning dry seasons with denser and more flammable tinder. 

Scenes of suburban infernos, grand pastoral vistas, and distant forests set ablaze populate his work, grounded in the empirical evidence of recent wildfire events around the world. In one painting, a lone firefighter is dramatically backlit, their solitary form rendered in an undulating weave of optically intermixing colors inspired by the Postimpressionist painter Georges Seurat. A nod to the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich’s wanderer, the lone figure is engulfed in flames, evoking a quiet, melancholic moment of sublime wonder and terror. Lindquist’s surfaces, textured and layered, suggest the accretion of ash and debris left in the wake of wildfires, sharpening the implicit critique of the Hudson River School’s settler-colonial vision. Those artists painted over long standing Indigenous forestry practices, (re)producing an imaginary of unspoiled wilderness that helped to drive the United States’ westward expansion under Manifest Destiny; Lindquist shows us the result of that erasure. 

In addition to examining fire as a primal force, Lindquist explores how urban sprawl and industrial pollution contribute to the intensification of wildfires. His paintings often depict underserved rural interstitial communities, and his insistent, confrontational subject matter reflects the growing problem of fires in an ever-warming world. While not claiming that paintings alone can achieve direct change, he believes that as part of a larger discourse around environmental justice their embodied experience can help to inspire new perspectives and urgency within broader activist movements. While the pace of these movements is glacial, their impact is significant and moving. Also, Lindquist often collaborates with activists, scientists, philosophers, musicians, and smokejumpers to sharpen his message. 

Together, Handley and Lindquist offer perspectives on the cultural and environmental processes and contradictions inherent in wildfires—our complicity in them and our attempts to mitigate their effects. While Handley focuses on materiality and process, Lindquist addresses broader cultural and ecological implications. Both artists challenge viewers to reconsider their relationship with nature, particularly in the context of climate change and increasing environmental instability. As the exhibition opens against the backdrop of a contentious presidential election, these questions take on renewed urgency: the stakes of its outcome echo fire’s dual nature—both destructive and generative, illuminating and masking.