Kings Canyon
2023

Kings Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California, 2023, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 155 × 122 cm, installation view: Coda, Einspach Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, 2023

Kings Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California, 2023, archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 155 × 122 cm

In autumn 2021, the KNP Complex burned across California’s Sierra Nevada, sweeping through Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks and affecting approximately 88,000 acres. Fire behavior was mosaic, with episodes of crown fire that permanently reconfigured parts of the montane conifer forests. Several sequoia groves suffered severe losses, with thousands of old trees killed or fatally damaged. In mixed conifer stands, including sugar pine, mortality surged as drought stressed and pathogen weakened trees succumbed, leaving broad fields of snags. Warming intensifies drought and heat stress and boosts bark beetle survival and outbreaks, thereby amplifying biotic damage. The introduced white pine blister rust and a century of fire exclusion further compound the crisis.

The work depicts a snag within Kings Canyon National Park, a standing dead sugar pine (Pinus lambertiana) burned during the KNP Complex. As an ecological indicator, it bears the imprint of high severity fire and elevated tree mortality while serving as critical habitat for cavity nesting birds, xylophagous insects, and wood decaying fungi. Concentrated in a single trunk, it attempts to grasp the cumulative effects of fire, drought, and biotic agents and to register the ecological transition that follows.

Kings Canyon, Sierra Nevada, California, 2023, detail