Norma I. Quintana | Forage from Fire
Third Floor Gallery July 29-December 15, 2023

If for decades the global scale of climate change seemed hard to grasp and harder to act upon, today there is something profoundly personal about our changing climate. It impacts us all, in vastly different ways and distinct times, but it impacts us all. 

Year after year the fire season in California has lengthened; the smell of smoke permeates the air, and ash rains down miles away from the locus of the fire. On October 8, 2017, the Atlas Peak Fire tore quickly and ferociously across Napa County, burning artist Norma I. Quintana’s family home and studio  to the ground. All that remained in the ash were disfigured remnants.  

In metal-soled boots, an N95 mask, and a pair of black gloves, Quintana got to work sifting through the ashes of the home she had lived in for over 25 years. In the fire’s wake, when her family had returned to their daily lives, Quintana, a celebrated photographer and self-proclaimed “work horse” who used to spend her days toiling away in her home studio, needed to find a way back to herself. 

I felt a deep sense of  loss -
Where are  my photographs? Books? Where's my computer? 
So going every day to the burned site like an archaeologist .. foraging through the ashes provided a sense of structure and comfort. 

Working on site without consistent lighting or even a proper camera, Quintana used her cell phone to photograph the objects she sifted from ash: the front of her mailbox, a piece of a passport, a doll’s leg, a melted photograph of her daughter playing violin. All are photographed atop a black rubber glove issued by CalFire required for returning to her property. The artist also offers collections of similar objects; photographed in the sifter amidst the soot and ash and atop the ground, these images give viewers just a tiny glimpse of the pallid landscape. And the objects themselves, placed in a vitrine where we can see but not smell or touch, invite us into another sensory relationship with objects that are still treasured, replicated in photographs, and stored in boxes with labels in the artist’s personal archive. 

The most common news image after wildfires is the figure standing in front of the charred remains of their home, but Quintana instead shares with us the things, emblematic of the memories they hold. Her home and studio —once  places of refuge—she keeps for herself. “I didn’t want to photograph the house and the destruction because I wanted to keep my memory sacred.” Her home, which the artist describes as epic, was lost. And though she’s remarkably sanguine about it today, she wants to preserve the memory. “I can walk into a room right now and close my eyes and I can see my house and that’s how I want to see it, not destroyed.”