November 13 through December 31, 2021
Opening Reception
Saturday, November 13, 6-9 pm
As the climate emergency progresses inexorably, we’re going to have to adapt to the changes it will bring to our world. And we’re going to have to learn to mourn the things it kills. It’s not going to be pretty. In A Wake for the West, Cody Norris shares his very particular grieving process.
Norris, a former seasonal wildland firefighter with the US Forest Service, says, “in this collection, I am celebrating and mourning the passing of locations and flora I hold dear; specifically, the Giant sequoia, the Sugar pine, and the Western redcedar. I have visceral memories of these California trees and this show is an imagined wake for these species; a gesture to a future in which they may not survive.”
In past shows, Norris has given us sometimes monumental, sometimes polemical views on California’s forests and man’s treatment of them: raging forest fires; ominous warnings. In this series, it’s very personal, more intimate, and – inevitably – more evocative and melancholy as you begin to realize you’re going to have to say goodbye, too, to the species that define California’s landscape.
These are, in a way, snapshots from memory of the Norris’s encounters with these arboreal sentinels.
“Sorting through images both remembered and photographed,” he says, “I seek to find moments that convey reverence and fondness.” In his signature process, “these artworks are painted, then burned, then painted, then burned in a process of erasure that mimics my fading recollection of the specifics. All that is left is an approximation of a feeling that I had at that time and place.”
The works in A Wake for the West – paintings, charcoals, pen and ink drawings – remind us of singed landscape snapshots you might find in the ruins of a house destroyed by wildfire. You pick them up and say, “a person was here, they saw this, they loved this.”
Fittingly, the dearly departed requiescat in pace (Latin: rest in peace) alongside their painted images. Norris has handmade three wooden urns that contain actual ashes of the sequoia, the sugar pine, and the western red cedar. In a meta twist, the urns are made from the species as well.
One of the things the experts warn us is coming is widespread grief from the things we’ll lose because of the climate emergency. Cody Norris and A Wake for the West might just give us a roadmap to cope with the trauma.
Cody Norris (b. 1981) was born from a surrogate mother in Amarillo, Texas and was raised in a small house about an hour west of Lake Tahoe, California. He grew up surrounded by the vistas of the California Sierras and was educated early in his childhood about land and nature by his father. He earned his BFA from the University of California, Davis, received his MFA from the California State University, Long Beach, and attended a post bac program through RISD. Norris lives and works in Riverside, California with his wife Erynn Richardson and their cat, Kali.