Description

Artist Statement By Dustin Ferguson

Captured in motion along Highway 93, this image is intentionally blurred—an echo of how memory distorts in the wake of trauma. The skeletal remains of trees, stripped bare by the 2024 forest fires, stand like silent witnesses to devastation. Their black trunks pierce the frame, stark and branchless, yet beneath them, green undergrowth begins to stir.

This photograph is not about clarity. It’s about emergence. About the forest re-finding its identity in the aftermath of destruction. The path to healing is not linear, and here, it is obscured—blurred by speed, by grief, by time.

The mountains in the distance remind us that endurance is possible. That even in ruin, there is the potential for rebirth. But the journey is messy, uncertain, and deeply personal.

What the Fire Left Behind invites you to sit with discomfort, to witness the tension between loss and renewal, and to consider how beauty often returns in forms we don’t expect.