Adam Thorman
Encounters with the uncanny: Adam Thorman meditates on the ‘New California Landscape’ in his photographic series Sunmoons.
Adam Thorman Artist Statement:
The New California Landscape
The newly dominant and destructive annual California fire season has recontextualized all previous artwork about the California landscape. Having grown up in the Bay Area, I have always felt a deep connection to its rolling hills and the rocky coasts, finding wonder in every nook and cranny I explored from my youth to adulthood. The fires are forcing me to reckon with a new emotional language as I relate to my home land.
The northern California coast has long been defined by its fog, the beach being more a place to walk in a jacket and consider life than a place to wear a swimsuit and bask in the waves. That fog held emotional weight, but it also was a comfort blanket to locals. LA could keep their sunny beaches. We loved our moody foggy ones. The fires have changed our relationship to the fog, though. The smoke presents in the same way as the fog. Only the smell and the layer of ash that comes with it differentiate the smoke. A trip to the foggy coastline now carries the new weight of fear. It reminds us of the smoke and fires and destruction of our cities. Fog will forever carry the question mark of smoke from the fires.
For a few years I was placing glowing orbs in my landscapes made in the coastal hills. Calling them Sunmoons, I focused on the wonder of a celestial body in the familiar brush. I now marvel at the folly of placing a glowing ball of fire in our flammable yellow hills, even metaphorically. Sunmoons feels like it comes from an innocent time that has no reference in today’s world. Firestarter might be a more apt name, and I can only hope that the images don’t carry the power of prophecy, causing more hills to burn.