Artwork by Rumi Vesselinova shows the landscape after the Las Conchas Fire. Courtesy/PEEC

PEEC News:

PEEC offers the unique opportunity to explore fire through both art and science.

The Las Conchas Fire in 2011 burned more than 150,000 acres in the areas around Los Alamos. During the fire and over the next four years, photographer Rumi Vesselinova has sought to capture how this event altered the visual landscape of the region.

Join the artist as she presents these images 7-7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 28 at the Nature Center.

Immediately after the artist reception, Terry Foxx will discuss the fire from the perspective of a plant ecologist. Having studied fire for 40 years, she shares what she has learned about nature recovering after fire and why we have conditions relating to fire and catastrophic fires. She presents a positive outlook about how the forest will recover after the devastation of a major wildfire. 

Foxx is a plant ecologist, writer and artist. She taught Plant Taxonomy at UNM-Los Alamos in the 1970s, wrote a book with Dorothy Hoard entitled Flowers of the Southwestern Woodlands, taught classes and led hikes for more than 40 years. She worked in conservation ecology at Los Alamos National Laboratory for more than 20 years. She has spent years studying the impact of fire on the ecosystem.

Vesselinova is a photographer and web designer based in Santa Fe. She was born in Bulgaria and has degrees in photography and in English and Bulgarian philology.

For the past 20 years she has lived in the Southwest and her photography is focused on the beauty as well as the environmental challenges of the region.

“I have taken pictures around the world, but the places closest to my heart have always been the American Southwest and my native Bulgaria,” Vesselinova said. “Different and distant as they are, they both speak to me in a profound, visceral voice. They both are beautiful in their own ways, but photographing them is not about beauty, composition or technical precision. It is about a level of closeness that does not allow for the separation of fascination and existential pain. Some pictures hopefully convey this most complex emotion, and viewers recognize it aesthetically.”

For more information about this and other PEEC programs, visit http://www.peecnature.org./, email programs@peecnature.org or call 505.662.0460.