LOS ANGELES – I remember when the smoke plume from the Palisades and Eaton fires left LA in January, its black veil drifting out to sea like a hand loosening its grip. Recently, it feels like the smoldering mass has returned as an ICE-shaped fist tightening from the coast to the San Fernando Valley. Fire and smoke have become a symbol of civic uprising, from incinerated Waymos and cop cars to the gray clouds that burst out of the LAPD’s tear gas canisters and munitions. The shifting symbolism of this volatile element in LA is the subject of the group show Burn Me! at The Box. Curated by Molly Tierney, along with the gallery’s owner, Mara McCarthy, and her father, artist Paul McCarthy, it took shape after the McCarthy family and Tierney lost their homes in the Eaton blaze. The resulting exhibition examines how fire has shaped art and life west of the San Bernardino Mountains — in the last six months and far earlier.
Artworks half-destroyed in January dot the gallery’s front rooms, intermingling with sculptures and paintings that examine the intersections between fire and social or environmental change. Jason Rhoades’s “Recession Era Perfect World Park Bench” (2001), previously a replica of an uncomfortable urban park bench, now bears Eaton’s scars: The aluminum tubes that formed its back and seat are now sagging and disjointed at jagged angles, while the L-shaped cinderblocks supporting these bars are singed brown. Similarly, the artist’s “Perfect World Swing Set” (2000–2001), a simple playground structure, looks like a post-apocalyptic relic, its black patina evoking suburban decline. For his Perfect World project, first installed in Hamburg in 1999, Rhoades placed a pristine replica of a complete town on an elevated Plexiglas platform supported by precarious, disorderly aluminum scaffolding, which he compared to a “Garden of Eden” lofted over “Hell.” The damaged artwork eerily reflects this statement.
The works in Burn Me! use fire, intentionally or unintentionally, to embody today’s social, political, and environmental struggles. Molly Tierney’s “Eight Flags” (2017–present) is a nearly floor-to-ceiling grid of American flags, their stars and stripes covered in black oil, debris, and dust, a veneer that makes the surface appear burned. This purposeful aesthetic effect (the work was not damaged in the fires) conjures present political sentiment and environmental devastation at once. Elsewhere, Paul McCarthy’s bronze sculpture “Ship of Fools, Ship Adrift, Hummel Box, Affected” (2010/2025) riff on Plato’s “Ship of Fools” parable, which charts the cursed journey of a boat’s dysfunctional crew. Now, McCarthy’s crowd of inept seamen are coated in an ashy crust, surrounded by a bent, fire-damaged hull. The work’s present condition reveals another, contemporary story of poor leadership, its char serving as evidence of inadequate city wildfire preparation and governmental failure to staunch climate change-fueled disasters.
One missing work haunts the exhibition: Wally Hedricks’s protest painting “Burn Me!” (1990), which featured the titular phrase jubilantly painted over an American flag—created in response to the “culture wars” and George H.W. Bush’s conservatism at the time. Destroyed in January, it now holds manifold meanings, even in its absence. In the midst of seemingly never-ending environmental and political crises, it feels more and more difficult for voices to be heard, and art to be seen — whether that’s because it is destroyed by fire or maced by police. With Burn Me!, The Box posits one way forward. These artworks grow under immense natural and unnatural threat, boasting their scars as new metaphors for contemporary life in LA.
Burn Me! continues at The Box (805 Traction Avenue, Arts District, Los Angeles) through July 5. The exhibition was curated by Mara McCarthy, Paul McCarthy, and Molly Tierney.