Tom Pazderka

In 2016 I began photographing and collecting ash of local California wildfires. Combining ash with white oil paint on wood panels that I burned and charred with torches, I painted the pyrocumulous ash clouds produced by the fires. Applied in thin layers, systematically, over long periods of time, the images emerge out of the ashy abyss.

After the ash cloud portraits, I began to paint old photos. Many of them came from my family photo albums. Others I found in books, old magazines, and on Reddit. Building these images in ash became an investigation into my family’s past, belonging, memory, nostalgia, politics, grief, exile, and failure. What connects these images in my mind is a haunting sense of the uncanny, high drama and the sublime.