After personal experiences with wildfire, visual artists Julie Comnick and Bryan David Griffith studied wildfire in the field with scientists from The Southwest Fire Science Consortium as part of the project "Fires of Change." Each then went on to exhibit solo work about wildfire. In their talk "Art on Fire," the artists will detail their approaches to creating art in conversation with science, and discuss how art can be a catalyst for change.

This talk is part of Spring Creek Project's lecture series "Lookout: Envisioning Futures with Wildfire."

Bryan David Griffith is an interdisciplinary artist who works across multiple media and learns or invents new techniques as needed to convey the concepts in each body of work. In 2016, Griffith won the Flagstaff Arts Council's Viola Award and the Phoenix Art Museum's Artist Grant for his work on wildfire. His exhibition "Rethinking Fire" is on view at the High Desert Museum until January 9, 2022.

Julie Comnick's paintings and drawings engage the pictorial languages of representation and narration to pose questions about social circumstances and practices. Her project "Ashes to Ashes" is a series of drawings depicting 14 significant Arizona wildfires from 1990 to the present, rendered with charcoal samples collected from each fire site.

"Lookout: Envisioning Futures with Wildfire" is an 11-week series exploring how we are shaping this era of megafires and how it is shaping us. Speakers from across the arts, humanities, and environmental sciences will help us scan the horizon for the ideas and stories that can guide us through this critical and disorienting time.

SCHEDULE
Talks in the series will be broadcast live on Zoom Tuesdays at 6 p.m. PST / 8 p.m. CST / 9 p.m. EST from January 4 to March 15. Learn more and register for other talks here: https://bit.ly/3lHTlex

This series is hosted by the Spring Creek Project and the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative at Oregon State University and co-sponsored by OSU's Center for the Humanities and Sustainability Office.