Bryan David Griffith

Ionize

2020

My work explores the idea that dualities—light and darkness, life and death, object and emptiness, forest and fire—aren’t opposed forces, but rather part of the same continuous cycle; one can’t exist without the other. I juxtapose soft organic lines with geometric forms that convey our desire to compartmentalize and control capricious natural processes like wildfire, often with unintended consequences. Each piece in Rethinking Fire is a precarious attempt to capture the ephemeral essence of fire by using fire itself to create paintings, sculptures, and installations. To create paintings, I burn petroleum—the most definitive and contentious commodity of our culture—in an open flame and hold a wooden panel coated with encaustic beeswax over the fire, accumulating the carbon from smoke in the molten wax over time. While my method is novel, artists have used these primal materials for thousands of years. This series grew out of a grant to develop work for a traveling exhibition about wildfire called Fires of Change, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. After spending many hours with scientists in burned landscapes, I saw first hand how by trying to protect our forests from death, we have inadvertently severed the cycle of life. I developed an appreciation for the power, beauty, and necessity of fire, and wanted to bring what I discovered in the forest to the gallery setting. In 2016, Griffith won the Flagstaff Arts Council’s Viola Award and the Phoenix Art Museum’s Artist Grant for his work on wildfire. His work is held in a number of permanent collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Phoenix Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Center for Creative Photography, and Fort Wayne Museum of Art. His recent solo exhibitions include the High Desert Museum, Fresno Art Museum, Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, Coconino Center for the Arts, and the Griffin Museum of Photography.