Kija Lucas

kijalucas.com | @kijalucas

In her photographic series Smolder, Kija Lucas uses a flatbed scanner to create imperfect artifacts from the recent California wildfires, exploring entropy and objecthood.

Kija Lucas Artist Statement:

Smolder focuses on the charred aftermath of recent California wildfires. I use a flatbed scanner, a contact method of making images, to create this work. The materials are often fragile, and sometimes fall to pieces when I lay them on the scanner bed, creating a motion in the still image that takes sometimes 20 minutes to expose. I embrace the digital artifact and dirtiness with making these images. These elements are often frowned upon in photography. An illusion of each object and a necessary distance for viewing, removing the objectivity, the artifacting - digital remnants of the scan that take place when the object moves as the image is recorded - further exacerbates this separation, the viewer can only look or not look, consider or not consider. There is no smell, texture, heat, the object is not present. With our inability to control our environment and the nagging desire to do so in a medium requiring the user to be exact, photography serves as both medium and mediator.

Checklist (left to right):

1. Smolder 227, Archival Pigment Print, 30” x 40”, 2018, $3200

2. Smolder 214, Archival Pigment Print, 30” x 40”, 2018, $3200

3. Smolder 33, Archival Pigment Print, 30” x 20”, 2016, $1800

4. Smolder 229, Archival Pigment Print, 30”x17", 2018, $2200

5. Smolder 81, Archival Pigment Print, 20” x 24”, 2016, $1800