Lightning struck Trinity County on July 30, 2021, and sparked a fire that burned for 88 days. Before it was fully contained, the Monument Fire consumed 223,124 acres, according to Cal Fire. One of the 28 structures destroyed was a lookout on Ironside Mountain (Tse:nding, as it is called by the Tsnungwe people).
“This mountain is where you went to be renewed, revived,” says artist Robert Benson, noting that for “hundreds of thousands of years, [people have been] climbing mountains to be closer to their gods, to brave a higher plane.” Tribal elders, he explains, have said this mountain is one “you could go up when you were old and come back young again.” He and Becky Evans, his wife and fellow artist, had this history and the story told by the tower, the fire and “interwoven stories of renewal” in the forefront of their minds as they gathered materials and made paintings and sculptures on the mountain over the past eight months.
Renewal – Collaborations by Becky Evans and Robert Benson, which engages with lightning’s effects at the site and offers viewers opportunities to connect with cycles of destruction and renewal, opens at the Morris Graves Museum of Art starting Aug. 30. While it’s their first joint project in 54 years together, site-specific, land-specific art, and their practice of going out into the landscape to make art on location, has been a way of life for Benson and Evans.
The two met at Humboldt State University in 1970, during what Benson calls “a golden era of the art department” in terms of its teaching staff and atmosphere. “For Humboldt County, it was still the ’60s,” he adds.
Evans concurs, describing classes where students might pass around a bota bag of wine or start dancing, where someone who wasn’t the model might take off their clothing.
“I was a nude model in her drawing class,” Benson interjects with a tone of mischief.
Evans laughs but insists it was purely professional, adding that anyone who’s taken a life-drawing class knows, “You’re so focused on trying to get the drawing done as fast as you can.”
She’d seen the abstract paintings Benson was working on then in a student show but says, “I didn’t understand it and I was like, ‘I kind of like this guy but what am I gonna say?'” Their common interests and aesthetics were to be found, then as now, outdoors. “We both went outside in the landscape to paint watercolors,” she recalls, both of them at home working in nature.
“We went out painting together when we were in our 20s. We went out hiking,” she says, as part of their respective artistic practices. “I cannot imagine a life where that’s not what we do.”
Each time, Benson says, there’s “a feeling of anticipation” when they set off for the day, knowing they are bound to find something.
Raised in the suburban sprawl outside Los Angeles in Whittier, Evans went to school amid smog heavy enough to cancel recess some days. A summer spent at a mountainside YMCA camp 7,000 feet above sea level changed her life. “I just felt so much more alive in the natural world,” she says. That was part of the draw of Humboldt County and the university. “It was as far away as I could get and go to a state college.”
Evans knew nobody in the area once she was dropped off by friends on their way to Canada. “I had heard that it rained but I was not prepared,” she says, chuckling over having arrived with only a poncho, no jacket and no raincoat. But she soon found her feet and, upon enrolling in a photography class that made her “look at the world in a new way,” her artistic eye.
There was also a brief stint as singer in a rock band, though she ultimately chose visual art over music. Benson still sounds a little awed recounting seeing her sing Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” at a bar with the band. “There’s this young woman singing on stage and I just said, ‘Wow.'”
Apart from the two years he spent earning an MFA at the University of Illinois, Benson has lived his whole life in Humboldt. Born at Trinity Hospital in Arcata, his parents brought him home four days later to their remote house in Willow Creek. There, he grew up on the river and with few neighbors and no television. “I spent those years in the landscape in a circle of family and extended family that worked the land in one way or another.” That circle was mainly Native, what his father called South Fork, now referred to as the Tsnungwe Tribe as it was formalized in the 1990s. On Benson’s mother’s side is a settler ancestry he says goes back to his great-great-grandmother Sarah Jane Lindsay, who, in 1851, was recorded as the second white girl in Arcata.
Benson serves as a cultural resource representative for the Tsnungwe Tribe in its dealings with the federal government, forest service and Caltrans when those bodies look to make changes to land where there may be cultural sites. If, for example, there are plans to run power lines through an area, Benson can determine through surveying it whether there’s likely to be a village site, and whether an on-site archaeologist or other measures are called for. “Because I’m old and I’m trained and I’m willing to go out and do it,” he says.
Ironside Mountain, located in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, is among the sites Benson monitors, a place he has found littered with detritus like glued rock stacks, “a dopey Buddha statue,” beer cans and deer rifle shells. The couple made repeated visitations to the mountain after the fire. The forest service, they say, did not clean the site immediately and covered it with black plastic, which the elements broke down over the following season. In the process of monitoring the hazardous cleanup, Benson absorbed and incorporated salvaged materials into a spiritual practice. The dominant remnants of the structure were copper in granite, from buildings coming down. He had inherited the responsibility for the land, and copper became part of a spiritual practice.
Ironside Lookout was registered as a National Historical Lookout on Jan. 3, 2015. Just six months later, it burned for the first time, in the River Complex Fire. The lookout survived this fire after the forest service wrapped it in aluminized material. Six years later, the Monument Fire blazed through the region and reduced the structure — despite it being wrapped again — to small, hard, melted blobs, wire nests and unintelligible fragments of industrial material.
“What’s the relationship of trying to handle, to mitigate lightning,” Benson remembers asking himself while looking at the lightning rods by the tower, “what’s that compared to meditating?”
Evans adds, “Here’s the irony of this forest lookout: That’s not a sacred site but it has its importance for so many people,” she says, necessitating a host of anti-lightning and anti-fire measures. And yet, she says, “All the protections were no match for wildfire — the irony of all the work done to protect the lookout that wasn’t going to save it.”
They approached this joint project, Benson says, in their usual way, “going out to places, letting the places tell us what, discovering things, taking off with that and not worrying too much about the end result.” He quotes writer Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene): “I don’t believe in magic, but I believe in interpreting coincidence exactly the way you want to.” Benson describes his approach as a way of listening to the land.
Evans explains it as a practice of “being available for what’s available to you.” To make the objects in Renewal, the two paid attention to “what’s been indicated.” They responded with artistic intervention to the land, its transformations and its artifacts. “There’s a lot of failure, which also feels important,” says Evans, who struggled to work with melted glass, trying every adhesive and consulting experts before landing on the right epoxy solution, resulting in a scarred bejeweled aesthetic with traces of black and other colored smears in the glass that reveal chemicals turned to gas during the blaze before finally being engulfed and preserved. It was worth it for her, “finding materials and residues from the fire. It has its own story,” as does “the bathtub ring of California poppies where the dam was removed.”
Evans and Benson say they consider many of the pieces in the show at the MGMA “sketches.” For them, it’s about showing the process and their “explorations” rather than perfected final products. “We’re exploring and letting ourselves go with it,” in terms of their interests and their artistic reactions, he says, like letting themselves get interested in the color of a piece of granite and seeing where it leads.
Evans’ and Benson’s assemblage sculptures are gory and gorgeous. Made of stone, copper, wire, glass and distorted bits of metal that were once manufactured things and are now once again raw material, the structures might nod toward familiar forms like inverted chandeliers or tombstones, but don’t go so far as to reference them. They call water and movement to mind, but they stand solidly and embody balance.
In their statement for the show, Evans and Benson describe stories of renewal integrated in the work, including the healing of landscapes after wildfire, and the ongoing cultural renewal and protection of sites sacred to the Tsnungwe people. Mirroring these renewals, Evans describes going up to blackened landscape and finding the first green shoots growing up. The art, she says, is a way of giving back a gift from the land.
Walking through the two halves of their shared studio building, the contrast between Evans’ and Benson’s work is distinguished by two types of line. Her pieces are lyrical and fluid, referencing water, motion and the rounded contours of land. Benson’s work is casually geometric, symbolic, drawing on traditional Native forms, patterned but relaxed.
The two styles of line are interwoven in their collaborative work, suggesting integration. It’s somewhat like integrations on the land: occupation by both forest service and tribe, natural fire cycles and human fire-management tools like lightning rods, human-made and natural materials, and the new growth emerging from the burned landscape. Art objects in Renewal embody contradictions fused together. The works are elegant and also brutal, suggesting monumental forces: geological, cultural and industrial. The overall impression is hopeful and reverent, as the objects stand as unflinching markers of a specific conflagration, as well as playful demonstrations of the power of creation and regeneration.
Some of the pieces in the show are his; some are hers, but Evans and Benson say they give each other input along the way. Then there are works where their hands are painting, shaping and sometimes burning a piece together. The latter is a new kind of collaboration for them.
“Well, I kind of pressured him,” Evans says with a laugh. “We have been talking about working together for years. … The really exciting thing is we haven’t separated, all these months,” she adds, laughing harder. “We actually had a good time.”
Usually working on their separate endeavors, Benson says, “We’re always sort of in the dugout of what the other one is doing, kind of standing by and conferring,” and often helping with physical labor as deadlines for shows bear down. “But the actual work together, we thought, ‘Well, it’s high time, we’d better do it now.'”
Some of the time pressure, Evans says, has to do with the physical work and how long they’ll be able to manage it. While on Ironside Mountain, Benson found a car door and dragged it to where they worked and painted, sometimes using their truck as a staging area for supplies. “And I said, ‘Bob, you dragged this from the mountain and there’s the mountain,” Evans says, describing the scratches in the painted metal they later enhanced to show the mountain’s profile. They went back and found a door from another car, this one with a form resembling a river.
“It was a fantastic day. We were walking on air because we found a rusted door,” Benson crows, adding he was even happier that it was a pain to haul, giving its story another layer.
“What really works for us is when we get alignment,” he says, and things start to work together, like the two doors. Likewise, the alignment of their work. “We have a very good thing,” he says, “ultimate respect … we really help each other.”
The show Renewal – Collaborations by Becky Evans and Robert Benson is on view in the Anderson Gallery of the Morris Graves Museum of Art from Aug. 30-Oct. 5. Morris Graves Museum of Art is located at 636 F St. in Eureka, and is open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 5 p.m.
L.L. Kessner is an Arcata-based artist and writer.Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal.com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill.bsky.social.
This article appears in ‘Come Back Young Again’.
