Art out of the Fire

Ethan Turpin’s Museum Show at Westmont Takes an Unexpectedly Timely Turn

Ethan Turpin's "Tea Fire" | Photo: Josef Woodard

By a strange coincidence and convergence of events, Ethan Turpin’s first museum exhibition opened at the Westmont Museum of Art in January, just as the Los Angeles wildfires were raging. WILDLAND: Ethan Turpin’s Collaborations on Fire and Water, fueled by Turpin’s background as both a conceptual artist and freelance photographer and filmmaker for the Santa Barbara Fire Department for the past decade, found himself in a timely yet uncomfortable synchronicity.

Art and tragic realities met, however accidentally. But the larger story behind the coincidental timing relates to the ever-present and increasing threat of fire, especially as climate change dislodges the natural order. That very theme is part and parcel of the exhibition, through which Turpin has explored “interdisciplinary thinking where artists, scientists, and media technologists collaborate.”

WILDLAND, the fullest expression yet of artistic ideas Turpin has shown in smaller doses and in group shows for years, is at once a wonder-filled ode to nature and a wake-up call to its fragility. Destruction and regeneration can come through the natural process of fire and the unnatural intrusion of human-caused climate change.

Museum-goers look at stereographs as part of the exhibit. | Photo: Brad Elliot
Ethan Turpin’s “Time Space Fire” | Photo: Josef Woodard
Sedgwick Oak image | Photo: Ethan Turpin
Burn Cycle | Photo: Ethan Turpin

Although the main body of work is the installation in the museum’s large gallery space, smaller Turpin works appear in the narrow entryway space. Turpin shows some of his retro-modernist stereoscope imagery, as seen in his earlier Gilded Garden series and the piece called “Clouds and Smoke,” in which a gathering of well-dressed late 19th-century picknickers sit to gaze with apparent admiration at the toxic plumes spewing from factories across the river. The piece denotes the blind innocence and faith in progress of the early period of industrialization.

To enter the large main gallery, dim-lit and radiated with ambient music sources, is to fall into an oddly meditative sight-sound dimension. The peace is disrupted by the sudden appearance of a wildfire and the sobering sound of crackling fire from the time lapse video work “Walk into Wildfire,” in which Turpin seamlessly stitches imagery of new plant growth and the surprise appearance of fire, an indifferent and voracious force sweeping everything in its path. But the video, assembled from clips gathered starting in 2015, also addresses the cyclical nature of nature.

The epic-scaled panoramic piece “Time Space Fire,” made in collaboration with Udo Gyene and Tai Rodrig, involves a vast horizontal screen, stretched across nearly an entire long museum wall. Some of the same footage of peaceful nature and raging fire have been subjected to data-alteration to create a rippling abstract impression, stripped of specificity but basking in impressionistic suggestion.

A different mode of juxtaposition of burning versus as-yet un-torched earth, with an extremely localized color, appears in the digital photo collage “Tea Fire: Westmont.” Using photos by Ray Ford and Brad Elliott, from the devastating 2008 Tea Fire, which partially burned Westmont College, Turpin created a visual narrative of contrasting states of landscape on campus.

Guests interact in the gallery with “Tree Water” | Photo: Brad Elliott

In another corner, the mood and color scheme turn cooler and bluish, with the slow-mo time lapse installation “Tree Water.” Here, water’s progress and process in nature seize the attentions of Turpin and collaborators (including Zach Gill’s hypnotic drone/ambient musical score). A lower-tech art component in the same gallery zone finds Turpin working in watercolor and ink on rag board, with “Tree Water: How Water Moves Through Soil, Plant, and Air,” with captions by the artist and Naomi Tague.

Ethan Turpin’s “Ember Trees” | Photo: Josef Woodard

As impressively shown in the parts and whole that is WILDLAND, Turpin manages to move fluidly between interests in art and science, a merging tendency becoming ever more relevant in the art world at large. The timing is in the air: Even more than political and social exigencies, the state of nature is cause for concern and awe. Artists can’t help but take note and inform and inflame our awareness.

Last week, Turpin’s project logically ventured outside the gallery home into Westmont’s lush vegetation for Ember Trees: An Outdoor Projected Installation, in which videos (by Turpin and Jonathan PJ Smith) of burning embers were projected onto trees actually affected by the Tea Fire. The event also included the evocative commission string quartet piece “Agua Quemado,” by Westmont music professor Daniel Gee, poetry by professor emeritus Paul Willis, and commentary from Montecito Fire Marshals Alex Broumand and Aaron Briner.

At the event, just after nightfall in a small grove of pine trees on campus, Turpin explained, “The reason we do this is to gain a healthy respect for a natural process. By making art associations, it presents with both the beauty and risk of fire. I think it’s safe to say that fire is beautiful.”

Another special family-oriented event attached to the WILDLAND project is a special Living Earth: A Family Day of Exploration, on Saturday, March 1. The exhibit is on view through March 22. See westmont.edu/wildland for details.