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The sculpture known as the Burning Man stands all week long in Black Rock City, absorbing energy from participants. Each year we lovingly recreate this wooden sculpture, we call the Man, we pour our energy into the Man & then let go. For some the Man represents nothing. But to quote, our late Larry Harvey, original Cultural Founder of Burning Man, “It is a blank canvas onto which to project your own thoughts and feelings, a ritual outside of context and unfettered by explanation.” 

On Saturday night of our event, through the intention of ritual, the Man is consumed by fire and flames will caress every surface. The simple act of releasing one’s art by fire reminds us of the immediacy and the fleeting nature of existence. We release our ownership over the Man, over any art that we liberate by fire & give it to the community. 

When the Man and the structure, he stands on, can no longer stay upright, the collapse of materials will crash into the fiery embers. What was once solid wood, wires, metal and neon, turn into twisted, melted, distorted, bizarre ruins and will attach themselves to other items in the embers. Everything that is touched and consumed by fire will transform. 

Once the fires have died down and the embers have cooled, the hunt for what has been buried begins. Within the ruins of the embers is the sweet spot, where the remnants are buried. To hunt for those treasures one must move close enough to the heat as humanly possible. It is within the heat of transformation that the remnants have turned a curiosity in 1997 into the actions not unlike an archeologist dig and continues into a yearly ritual. 

The ruins, for me, are just the starting point. I can construct new ideas, symbols of a new beginning. Like a Phoenix rising out of its ashes – the desire to burn the old & make way for the new; the cycle of death & rebirth; the opportunity to reinvent oneself. The shadow box contains a partial selection of remnants from Burning Man 2019.