EVERGREEN AUTUMN

California’s disastrous wildfires will become yet another marker in the declining health of our environment as humanity through ignorance and in futility fails to remedy their hubris. This body of work documents the resulting damage done to California’s Silicon Valley in the late summer of 2020. Among the charred fields and burnt crops, we see nature enacting its own means of repair, resilient but unaware of the continuous punishment inflicted upon it. We see both hope in the breadth of Earth’s forgiveness and the inevitable dread in our stubbornness to repent. In these photographs, my own fears for our future are reflected through the medium of the romantic landscape. Stripped of its context, the environment could be mistaken for an autumn countryside. The beauty of dying leaves conceal their charred history. Orange and brown occupy every corner of the image like embers, fueling the fires; dread hovering, hanging in the air. The dissonance of this landscape, the damage it is trying to repair and conceal mirrors our own urgency to bury our environmental damage. The ash that hangs in the trees and the dirt as a result of our own actions contribute great and small to a collective cloud that seeps into every home and into the very soil. My framing in this work reflects an existential dread, a fear that it is far too late to make change, or perhaps nearly too late. But the dynamic between repairing and concealing carries another alternative. Although the ash is obfuscated by nature and by us, these photographs cannot conceal nature’s own statement: that of a willingness to forgive us, to compromise and accommodate us, and to sustain us if only we repay it in love.