I just wrapped up my latest exhibition, System Status, at the Bear Gallery in Fairbanks. 

What did I learn from the experience? A new phrase, for one: turn and burn¹. Verb? Noun? Take your pick. You can turn and burn or you can do a turn and burn. Multiple times I heard it used, by different people in different places, to refer to the act of driving from Anchorage to Fairbanks, taking care of some business, and immediately driving back like a maniac, for a sum total of more than 12 hours of nearly uninterrupted driving. 

I only turned and burned once, though I did the long drive twice in the month of August. The first time, I actually spent a few days in the city of Fairbanks. I walked along the river, picked blueberries at Murphy Dome, went to a farmers market, and hung out at the public library (it was, in retrospect, quite a wholesome visit). I spent a lot of time trying to mentally work out the fundamental difference between Fairbanks and Anchorage, which led me to think about the book Invisible Cities, which reminded me about archetypes, which inspired the idea that Fairbanks is a river city and Anchorage is a port city, which either explains nothing or everything.

In some ways this exhibit was a followup to the State Parks residency I did last year at a cabin in the Chena River State Recreation Area (right outside of Fairbanks). I have had a non-arsonous fascination with fire—as a natural phenomenon, as a visual subject, as a symbol of humanity’s self-imposed doom—for years². Unintentionally, fire also emerged as something of a theme during that residency. While my most recent trips northward were uneventful, last summer I passed large swaths of smoldering forest and was stopped for prolonged periods where crews were fighting active blazes. Thankfully, the fires were nowhere near the cabin, but as I hiked around I would occasionally come across signs of past burns: recent re-growth, a chunk of blackened wood on the forest floor, or a single charred tree standing like a monument in the otherwise green landscape.

One time I picked up a small piece of burned wood, carried it back to the cabin, and tried drawing with it. Encouraged, I moved on to scribbling madly over whole sheets of paper, which I then cut up to collage into burnt-looking geometric shapes. Those cabin experiments led eventually to learning how to make my own willow charcoal (and realizing that there is a difference between partially burned wood and true charcoal) and using it to create more refined fragmented compositions. Fire, in other words, was more than a theme or subject; it became part of the process.

Gallery openings are not my favorite events (I already knew that), but I am grateful to everyone who came and asked questions to relieve some of the awkwardness of standing around looking at other people looking at things. Questions are good. Questions mean that I have made something that does not fall right into what people expect, and it is always good to see people working for the prize of understanding. As to the most common question I receive, which is some version of “How long did it take?”, I cannot provide a good answer, partially because it is not something I think about. It is, in fact, something I try not to think about. I am aware of time passing as I work, of course, but not interested in tracking it as a number. How long? A long time, in one way; but, in another, simply one moment, then another.

During my post-exhibition turn and burn the other day, I can tell you that I spent more than 12 hours in the car. I drove through rain for hundreds of miles. I saw no fires, no smoke, just a lot of RVs and a disturbing amount of roadkill (still processing the cartoon-dead expression on a young moose I saw north of Willow). I returned home feeling like I had been away for a week, even though I had left that very morning. The world had not turned even one whole rotation, and I had burned two tanks of gas.

_{¹ I have avoided digging into the etymology of the phrase, partly because I assume it has some military-related origin.}

_{² My brother has a theory that you can pretty accurately guess that something was written by AI if it contains an em-dash because no one knows how to use or type them, but I promise I wrote all of this and spent several minutes clumsily inserting the em-dashes myself.}