During the summer of 2011, New Mexico witnessed an unprecedented number and size of wildfires. For two months, smoke and ash suffocated the state. However hot and dismal that summer season was, the nightly news put on a photography competition for the most beautiful sunset. I couldn’t help but think of the irony of aestheticizing something so suffocatingly depressing. It was indeed the catastrophic sublime.
As a visual artist, I wanted to respond with images. My images, however, depict the cityscape and landscape as the dreary space it was during and after the wildfire. Using collage, I can compress these two in time – before and after – and space – the terrestrial and celestial.