After the Fires
Margaret Griffith, Spiral Staircase, 2025. (Track 16)
Presented on a small shelf at Track 16 gallery in downtown Los Angeles is a hammer that is swaddled in white plaster bandages. It sits before a small piece of windowsill that too has been wrapped in the material, a common craft supply used to make sculptures and body casts. The bandages give these ordinary objects a ghostly cast. They also evoke something that has been injured and is now in a state of repair. Plaster bandages bear an uncanny resemblance to the gauze ones used by doctors to dress wounds.
The presence of some past harm is indeed at the core of these spectral objects. LA sculptor Jamison Carter created them from detritus pulled from the remains of his home in Altadena after the Eaton Fire. And they are now on view in the group exhibition My House Burned Down, organized by fellow artist Camilla Taylor, an LA sculptor and printmaker who also lost her home in the Eaton Fire.
Since the fires ravaged LA, the city’s artistic community has staged fundraisers as well as benefit exhibitions for artists who suffered losses. But My House Burned Down expresses these losses directly through art.
Jamison Carter, Softpower, 2025. (Track 16)
Taylor says that as she mulled putting together some sort of exhibition in the wake of the fires, a number of people suggested she do something inspired by the legend of the mythical phoenix that rises from the ashes. But she felt that the story didn’t capture the devastation she felt (and still feels) after losing her home and her studio. “First, that’s not how art works,” she says. “It also felt very strange — that sort of assumption that you can rise out of something like this happening. … So many people, like myself, lost everything.”
What she did find comfort in were fellow artists who had had or were having similar experiences. Taylor heard from figures like Christina Bothwell, a glass artist who lost her Pennsylvania studio to a fire in 2018, and performer Jacy Catlin, whose rural Wisconsin home was incinerated after a fire escaped a wood-burning stove in the basement. (In his deeply saturated photographs, included in the show, he captures the surreal sight of the icicles that clung to the remnants of his home after firefighters pummeled it with water in the middle of the Midwestern winter.)
“They would check in on me and they gave me a lot of advice,” says Taylor of her fellow fire survivors. “They told me that it’s okay to be fucking mad, that you don’t have to bounce back, that it could take a long time.”
Works by Catherine Ruane (left) and Christina Bothwell in My House Burned Down at Track 16. (Track 16)
Instead of building some sort of metaphorical exhibition around a phoenix, Taylor decided to confront the topic directly with a title that leaves no question about who is included or why. My House Burned Down features the work of four artists who lost their homes and studios in the Los Angeles fires in January, along with four others from around the United States.
Among the artists featured is LA sculptor Margaret Griffith, who happens to be married to Carter, and who is represented in the show by several aluminum and steel pieces that were likewise drawn from the remains of her home. Griffith’s intricate installations — made from paper, aluminum, or steel — often resemble large-scale works of cut paper, bearing elaborate color and pattern. The pieces on view in the show, however, are the fragments that remained after the fires were put out: pieces of metal that are bent, singed, and twisted by the scorch of the flames. They remain striking and elegant nonetheless.
Among the most poignant works is Taylor’s own contribution, an installation titled Change (2025). A narrow side table holds a brass printing plate with the word “Change” etched into its surface, as well as a stack of silkscreened sheets that each contain a faint white map of Altadena. Viewers are invited to take a sheet and use it to make a rubbing of the plate with a large black crayon that was cast in the form of Taylor’s home. Each rubbing creates a sooty stain on the delicate image of Altadena as the word “Change” is revealed. It also slowly wears out the crayon, the shape of the house becoming eroded with every use. (You can view an Instagram video of the process here.)
Camilla Taylor's black crayon in the form of her home from Change, 2025. (Track 16)
Taylor made the crayon of her house from memory. “Later, I looked at photos and I realized I had the roofline wrong,” she says. “It’s about thinking about the preservation of a thing that’s gone and how important the space was to me, but now it just exists in my mind — and I’ll rebuild it there.”
Change comes in ways that can be devastating and unexpected. This moving show faces it head on.
🏠🏠🏠
My House Burned Down is on view at Track 16 through June 28; track16.com.
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