Jim Denney, a 20-year wildland firefighter turned painter, and Dennis Gordon, an NYC firefighter who spent decades documenting abandoned buildings, share a show about decay and the Anthropocene
September 5–October 4, opening reception Saturday, September 5, 5–7pm | Hudson, NY
Time & Space Limited opens "On Fire" on September 5, pairing paintings by Jim Denney with sculptures by Dennis Gordon—two artists whose work grew directly out of firefighting careers, one in Pacific Northwest wildlands, the other in the burning tenements of the South Bronx.
Denney's grandparents left Wisconsin's cutover forests and the Dust Bowl Midwest during the Depression to work in Oregon and Washington's timber industry. He grew up in the forest and worked as a seasonal wildland firefighter for over twenty years while pursuing art, and his paintings translate that firsthand experience of the forest into what he describes as emblems of the "anthropocene"—observations, recollections, and memorials for landscapes altered by fire.
Gordon's path ran through a different kind of ruin. He began breaking into abandoned buildings as a boy, then became a New York City firefighter in 1978, starting his career in the South Bronx during a period when the city was, literally, burning with vacant buildings catching fire daily. He later lived on the Lower East Side surrounded by blocks of vacant tenements dating to the late 1800s and early 1900s, exploring structures that had become sites for heroin use amid the neighborhood's decline.
Studying the city's 20th-century history since, he's come to understand that decline as the direct result of deliberate policy—developers like Robert Moses pushing to remove industry and tenement housing, banks redlining the resulting depressed real estate in coordination with government, displacing the immigrant communities who'd depended on those jobs. His sculptures recreate that wreckage as a kind of memorial to the people displaced by it, built from decades spent photographing mills, warehouses, foundries, asylums, prisons, and foreclosed homes across the country and abroad—structures he describes as a form of living art, endlessly changing as rust, mold, and collapsing brick slowly overtake them.
Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia Street, Hudson, NY. More at timeandspace.org.
