Kim Light/LightBox is pleased to announce Containment, the gallery's second solo exhibition by Samantha Fields. In photoreal paintings depicting landscapes caught in the sudden turbulence of wildfires, Fields continues an exploration of extraordinary and extreme environments. A series of new paintings on canvas registers the artist's ongoing encounters with contemporary ecology, capturing the sublime sensations of the most vulnerable beauty in the throes of devastating forces of nature.

Each of the paintings in Containment corresponds to a particular photograph the artist shot during the increasingly frequent Southern California wildfires. In dozens of small canvases, and one large work, the exhibition offers a narrative composed of the multiple perspectives of various wildfires in distinct stages of progression—from hills and mountains engulfed in towering plumes of smoke, to charred defoliated forests still steaming in the wake of the fireline. The extreme refinement of the airbrush technique the artist employs—along with slight traces of brushwork—exposes the painterliness of the fires themselves. Subject to a kind of forced aerial perspective, wherein smoke from the fires gives every image a hazy luminance; the works faithfully reproduce the billowing modulations of hue and tonality pouring forth from these natural disasters.

Engaging issues central to depictions of North American landscape since the 19th  century Hudson River school painters, Fields paintings capture the sovereignty of the hills and mountains of Southern California and contain them in moments of sublime rupture. Largely devoid of human presence, there is nevertheless a powerful sense of trespass in many of these depictions of wildfires, as if they are symptomatic effects of human-made causes, such as invasive species of vegetation, fire suppression, and ahistorical changes in climate. The consequences documented in Containment call to mind in the same scene both the vulnerability of an idyllic landscape to the ecological consequences of human activity, and the vulnerability of civilization once natural disasters are unleashed.
Samantha Fields lives and works in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Cranbrook Academy  of Art (MFA) and the Cleveland Institute of Art (BFA), Fields is a Professor at California State University, Northridge. In addition to her solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, the artist has exhibited in numerous group shows in the United States and abroad, including The Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), Wignall Museum (San Bernadino, CA), Solway Jones (Los Angeles, CA), Traywick Contemporary (Berkeley, CA), Melanee Cooper Gallery (Chicago, IL), Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), Jones Center for Contemporary Art (Austin,TX), Galerie Enholm Englehorn (Vienna, Austria); and the Amelia Museum of Archeology (Umbria, Italy).