Fire’s Burning, a new exhibition at the Art Gallery of Alberta, is an extensive showcase of works exploring our evolving relationship to fire. Pulled from the gallery’s collection, the works reach as far back as 1882 (Frederick Arthur Verner’s The Buffalo Stampede). Despite such historical pieces, curator Lindsey Sharman was keenly aware that any visitor to the gallery would see the exhibition through the eyes of the present.
Each work, as a result, is given new life and new context. It’s difficult, for example, to look at Marigold Santos’s moonlight desire, midnight fires, 2018, which depicts a light beyond the hills in Joshua Tree National Park, and not think of the recent Los Angeles fires. Similarly, Evolve, 1988, a minimalist painting of smoke in reds and yellows by Jeffrey Spalding looks as if it could have been painted during any recent Canadian summer, en plen air.
Perhaps no element has proven as consequential to the 21st century — let alone to all of human history — as fire. The devastating fires and smoke-filled skies that have come to define our summers are just one warning sign of the climate crises we face. “Wildfire season” — now synonymous with warm weather — has reshaped our relationship to our homes, our forests, and to the sky itself, rendering the air we breathe something to be cautious about. In the short term, wildfires are a destructive force that rear their heads annually; in the long term, they threaten our ecosystems, our health and our way of life.
But the exhibition is not simply a map of despair or destruction. It complicates our understanding of fire, and in turn our understanding of ourselves and our own behaviour, by highlighting how entangled fire is in our lives. Putting Wood In Stove, 1974, a simple painting by Allan Sapp, is just one reminder in the show that fire also has a history of heating and lighting the spaces humans have lived in.
For Sharman, representing the complexity of our relationship to fire was an important part of the exhibition. “We’re not living in a time of nuance,” she says. “I wanted to add a bit of nuance to our conversation about fire.”
One of the standout pieces in the exhibition — a work that manages to embody the nuance Sharman speaks of — is Christian Boltanski’s Les bougies, 1989, a collection of copper wire figures mounted on stands next to small tea lights. The work is the only one in the exhibition to incorporate living fire (Blair Brennan’s Perish Like The Word, 1996, which involves branding letters onto the gallery wall, comes close). As the lights flicker, the figurines cast shadows against the gallery wall.
The work feels ancient and contemporary all at once. And though it’s about fire Boltanski’s installation is also about balance. The tea lights, placed precariously on the edge of their mounted stands, cast light and warmth. But there is risk as well. The candles could fall, the fire could spread and the element we so long ago learned how to ignite, to use, could slip out of our control.
Fire’s Burning is on display at the Art Gallery of Alberta until January 4, 2026.
