Now this is Home

Now this is Home

New works by Kurtis Major in Petrichor

December 13, 5-8pm

It was 5:00 am in Northern California on November 9th, 2018. My phone was vibrating on the floor of my bedroom, instinctively I picked it up. It was my mom; I could hear she was scared yet composed. My parents were being evacuated as we spoke. Mom asked me what she should grab from the house. Without hesitation, I said, “get a few pairs of clothes, water, food, and the things you love.” At that moment, I did not realize that the last bits of our family home would soon vanish into ash.

The Southern California Woolsy fire swept quickly through my childhood neighborhoods, reshaping all of my material memories into an unrecognizable landscape. I had forgotten that time exists within a space beyond our ability to control its consequences. We are only actors bearing witness to its passing in nanoseconds, minutes, hours, days, and decades. The compression of time and space resides between our constructs of what is possible or what we think is possible.

The flesh is bound to the body with tendons, ligaments, blood, and tissue, much like the framework that we place around space and time. These notions of form, shape, and place are but assembled perceptions. In the end, it is all fleeting. Time is driven out of the hourglass by an autonomous force such as a fire. Time as a constraint necessitates to free us from the attachment to materiality and reveals the beauty of the impermanent.

I have not attempted to recreate the power of the wildfire in these sculptures. My intention was to fully inhabit the alchemical space of these materials and through this lens my goal was to examine Nature’s skill in distilling new forms out of chaos. My interest lies in experiencing the molecular structure of form and volume from the remains of our family’s home.

In as much as we can form new memories to a place, materials are also reshaped by the process of melting, bending, forging, twisting, folding, brazing, hammering, and rejoining. These processes ultimately shift our relationship to the space, form, time, and the understanding of the place we call home.