LOS ANGELES – I remember that the plume of smoke from the Palisades and Eaton Fires LA left in January, drives his black veil to the sea as a hand that loosens the hold. Recently it feels like the smoldering mass has returned as an ice-shaped fist from the coast to the San Fernando Valley. Fire and smoke have become a symbol of social uprising, from burnt Waymos and COP cars to the gray clouds that burst out of the tear gas buses and ammunition of the LAPD. The shifting symbolism of this volatile element in LA is the subject of the group show Burn me! In the box. Together with Molly Tierney, together with the owner of the gallery, Mara McCarthy, and her father, artist Paul McCarthy, it took shape after the McCarthy and Tierney family lost their houses in the Eaton Blaze. The resulting exhibition investigates how fire has formed art and life west of the San Bernardino -Bergen – in the past six months and much earlier.
Artworks half destroyed the front rooms of the gallery in January, with sculptures and paintings that investigate the intersections between fire and social or environmental change. Jason Rhoades’s “Recession ERA Perfect World Park Bench” (2001), formerly a replica of an uncomfortable couch in the Stadspark, now carries the scars of Eaton: the aluminum tubes that form his back and chair are now hanging through and stammered with shocks, while the L-shaped children’s blokes are. Similarly, the “Perfect World Swing Set” of the artist (2000–2001), a simple playground structure, looks like a post-apocalyptic relic, his black patina that calls for the drops of the suburbs. For his Peculiar world Project, first installed in Hamburg in 1999, Rhoades placed an unspoilt replica of a complete city on a raised Plexiglas platform that is supported by precarious, disorderly aluminum scaffolding, which he compared To a “Garden of Eden” loft over “Hell”. The damaged artworks reflect this explanation creepy.
Work in Burn me! Use fire, deliberately or unintentionally, to embody today’s social, political and environment. Molly Tierney’s “Eight Flags” (2017-present) is an almost floor to ceiling grid of American flags, their stars and stripes covered with black oil, debris and dust, a veneer that burns the surface. This targeted aesthetic effect (the work was not damaged in the fires) evokes the current political sentiment and the destruction of the environment at the same time. Elsewhere, Paul McCarthy’s bronze sculpture “Ship of Fools, Ship Adrift, Hummel Box, affected” (2010/2025) on Plato’s “Ship of Fools” sarabel, which maps the cursed journey of the dysfunctional crew of a boat. Now McCarthy’s crowd of awkward sailors are covered with an ashish crust surrounded by a bent, fire -damaged hull. The current condition of the work reveals a different, contemporary story of bad leadership, its Char serves as proof of insufficient nature fire preparation and the failure of the government to increase climate change disasters.
One missing work chases the exhibition: Wally Hedricks’s protest painting “Burn Me!” (1990), with the titular expression that was painted jubilantly about an American flag – made in response to the “cultural wars” and the conservatism of George HW Bush at the time. Destructive in January, it now has multiple meanings, even in his absence. In the midst of apparently never-ending environmental and political crises, it feels increasingly difficult to vote to be heard, and to see art or that is because it is destroyed by fire or by the police. Of Burn me!The box sets a way forward. These artworks grow under a huge natural and unnatural threat and have their scars such as new metaphors for contemporary life in LA.
Burn me! Continues in the box (805 Traction Avenue, Arts District, Los Angeles) until July 5. The exhibition was compiled by Mara McCarthy, Paul McCarthy and Molly Tierney.
