Fire Season III Launch

Join us at READ Books for the launch of Fire Season III. Enjoy a refreshment and buy a copy of the newest edition of Fire Season!

Fire Season was founded in 2019 by Liz Toohey-Wiese and Amory Abbott with the goal of publishing an artist book that explored the conceptual and existential symbolism of wildfires through visual art and writing. By bringing together creative minds to have a more diverse conversation on the topic, a collective understanding began to spread around the complex and often contradictory ways that wildfires impact our different lives, communities, and surroundings.

Liz Toohey-Wiese (she/her) is a graduate from the MFA program at NSCAD University. She completed her undergraduate degree in painting at Emily Carr University. Living in Vancouver, she has spent the last three summers doing artist residencies in rural BC, including the Sointula Art Shed (2019), The Caetani Cultural Center (2020/2021) and Island Mountain Arts (2021). She is a member of the Cascadia Wildfire & Urban Smoke Working Group. Her work explores the complicated topic of wildfires and their connections to tourism, economy, grief, and renewal. Primarily a painter, her artworks have also taken the form of billboards, postcards, books, essays, and one-on-one interviews to name a few. She seeks whenever she can to educate herself on forestry practices, the history of wildfire policy, climate change, and the urban/rural divide in BC. Liz teaches drawing and painting at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Visit Liz’s website at: liztoohey-wiese.com

Amory Abbott (he/him) holds an MFA in Visual Studies from Pacific Northwest College of Art, and a BFA in Illustration from Herron School of Art and Design. His recent research has landed him in artist residencies in Glacier National Park in Montana, and along the northwest coast of Ireland at the Boghill Centre. Now a permanent resident in Canada and living in Vancouver, BC, Amory’s creative practice primarily addresses the modern West’s relationship to landscape, with an interest in reconnecting people to a more spiritual and primeval experience of wild places. Blending themes of fantasy, the esoteric, ecology, climate crisis, and natural cataclysm, his charcoal works take a melancholy and magical look at the dark and forgotten places of the world. Amory has been a core faculty member in the Illustration department at Emily Carr University of Art + Design since 2017.
Visit Amory’s website at: amoryabbott.com