黑料不打烊

Ed Ruscha finished his seminal painting The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire in 1968, and a half century later his searing depiction of the original LACMA campus seems prescient as the buildings captured in that painting are set to be demolished for a new superstructure designed by a Swiss architect who is fond of, ironically, incorporating charred wood into his designs. Of course, fire is a cleansing mechanism, and its regenerative qualities burn bright in the practices of countless Los Angeles artists, perhaps because many, if not all, of them鈥攅specially those who have lost homes, studios, archives or more to wildfires historic and recent鈥攍ive with the existential threat of these conflagrations touching them year after year after year.

This is the thrust of L.A. On Fire , a multimedia group show curated by Michael Slenske at the newly expanded space of Wilding Cran Gallery at 1700 South Santa Fe Avenue. The show鈥檚 title derives from a photo series, featured in the exhibition, by French artist Michel Auder. Along with the work of more than 50 emerging and established LA artists, this titular work investigates the possibility that LA has gone from Tomorrowland to an Ever Burning Bacchanalia. And in this moment of Nero-esque nihilism, we can鈥檛 look away as we watch our house(s) burn down: LA is literally on fire and in the same moment.

The exhibition also repeatedly addresses Didion鈥檚 conceit: that fire is (and perhaps always was) the truest expression of the LA landscape. Just as the frequency of headlines warning of the next inferno have shortened from monthly and weekly to daily and hourly, CalFire鈥檚 2018 Strategic Fire Plan asserted: 鈥淐limate change has rendered the term 鈥榝ire season鈥� obsolete.鈥� In other words, the fire is the landscape and you can no longer separate one from the other. Though maybe there was never a fire season to begin with. Maybe LA鈥檚 fires鈥攋ust like those which have ravaged the Amazon, Western Europe, and Siberia in recent months鈥攏ever stopped burning and maybe they never will. If anything, L.A. On Fire is meant to serve as an artist鈥檚 perspective onto both possibilities.