The California artist Dashiell Manley had been at work for over a year on the paintings he was to exhibit at Marianne Boesky Gallery’s elegant new show California Is Somewhere Else when fate intervened. In early January, he set the works to dry in his studio in Altadena – and two days later nearby Eaton Canyon was engulfed in flames, part of recent California wildfires. “My sense of security was shattered around 11pm on January 7th,” Manley told me via video interview. “I went in the studio and it was smoky, and all the paintings were wet.”
That night, Manley’s thoughts were more preoccupied with protecting his family and grabbing on to what precious mementoes he could take with him as he fled the fires. His studio was ultimately spared, but the paintings were not: smoke and other particles embedded into the still-wet surface, ruining the pieces. “I don’t know that I’ve processed that these 10 paintings that I’ve spent a year working on are gone,” he told me. “They smell like a camp fire, and there’s lead particles in the surface – I don’t want to touch them. It’s weird how they’re gone but they’re not.”
