F!RE F!RE F!RE — Adelson Galleries

Adelson Galleries presents Spazuk’s F!RE F!RE F!RE: a story telling and virtual experience. Working with fire as his primary creation tool, Spazuk’s Fumage embodies the polarity of creation and destruction. The artist’s work explores human’s ambivalent relationship with the natural world through the lens of the climate crisis and the Anthropocene. Bridging the illusive gap between human beings and Nature through his choice of elemental media, carbon from soot, Spazuk exemplifies that there is potential to create beauty, contemplation and possibility when working with Nature, rather than against it.

Inspired by the outbreak of global fires due to the climate crisis, F!RE F!RE F!RE is the artist’s perspective and response to the state of urgency that is our present moment. Released in three chapters, the collection narrates Spazuk’s realistic optimism on climate justice and systemic change. The virtual show is divided into chapters: Connect, Understand and Act-- proposing a cyclical approach toward converging actions of reparation.

In order to arrive at a state of systemic balance, notions of linearity and separateness must be deconstructed. Unlike classical methods of storytelling, (taking the structure of beginning, middle and end), Spazuk aims to create a recurrent unfolding process, where usually defined, finite sections are now interwoven and interdependent. There is no end and no beginning, there is only presence and re-presentation. Such is the language of art; to represent, to engage with, to question what we have been given, and ask where we go from here.

The experience of witnessing Spazuk’s work sparks engagement and an embrace of the discomfort that inevitably comes with change. Spazuk’s practice awakens us to the fact that there is no easy fix-- no happy ending that wraps up the tale into a pretty bow. Instead, there is a line of understanding that carries us through the cycles of undoing and rebuilding. Like flames rising from the ashes, built on the rubble of the past; we are reminded that with all destruction there is potential for a powerful creative force to rise up and illuminate the way forward. We are always already, turning the page, humbly bearing witness to the call forward.