After: Altadena | Pacific Palisades
Excerpts from AN EXPLORATION of the marks left on the towns ravaged by the blazes of 2025.
As the fires in Pacific Palisades and Altadena last January raged, I felt an inescapable urge to go to Los Angeles, guided by a responsibility to a central thread that weaves throughout my practice in the liminal space between human intervention and the environment. The first journey opened a space for reflection on a moment that revealed our vulnerability and culpability in paving the way for this tragedy and others that will surely follow.
With successive trips over the past year, I found evidence progressively washed away or removed, leaving scorched traces on concrete, exposed foundations, temporary barriers, and sandbags meant to contain what lingers. The images began to operate increasingly in symbolic register, still carrying an elegiac weight while opening onto broader societal considerations.
My role shifted from witness of acute collective trauma to an agent for broader sociopolitical inquiry, presenting questions of property, privacy, foundations, and boundaries, and the contrasting ways we position ourselves in relation to the environment as dependents, exploiters, and stewards. The work and my relationship to it evolved beyond the specificity of the events themselves and toward the conversations these spaces open about responsibility to the land and to one another, and about landscape as image, as ideal, and as the physical platform upon which those ideals are constructed and enacted.
