Ari Salomon
Project Statement
Burn Line
Burn Line is an ongoing photographic and sculptural project exploring loss, memory, and transformation in the wake of California’s increasingly destructive wildfires. It begins with photographs of personal objects lost or damaged in fires—ordinary belongings that carry the traces of individual lives and histories. Collected from people who have experienced these losses, the images become the starting point for a process I call Pyrotype.
I engrave each photograph into wood using a CNC router, then transform the wood into charcoal through pyrolysis, heating it in a low-oxygen environment. The resulting black-on-black objects occupy a space between photograph, sculpture, and relic. The image is no longer simply a record of something that existed; it becomes a physical object transformed by the same elemental force that destroyed its subject.
At its core, Burn Line considers how images travel through time and between people. A photograph made within the intimacy of a home can, after its destruction, take on an entirely different meaning. Removed from its original context, it becomes a fragment of a personal history that can be shared, interpreted, and remembered by others. As these images move from private archives into a collective body of work, individual experiences of loss begin to form a broader account of displacement, memory, and resilience.
This movement resonates with the idea of a tide: images circulate, disappear, and resurface, carrying different meanings as they encounter new contexts and audiences. The landscapes left by fire are continually altered, but so too are the images through which we understand them. What was once an ordinary photograph becomes evidence of an absence, and eventually something new.
Burn Line does not seek to reconstruct what was lost or simply document destruction. Instead, it asks what remains when the objects that anchor our memories disappear, and how images might help us carry those memories forward. Through the transformation of photography into material form, the project explores the shifting boundaries between image and object, personal memory and collective history, destruction and renewal.
Artist Bio
Ari Salomon is a San Francisco–based artist whose practice spans photography, sculpture, and installation. Working with images as both records and materials, he explores how photography can extend beyond the two-dimensional image into physical objects and spatial experiences. His work examines the relationships between perception, memory, time, and the ways images shape our understanding of the world.
His recent project Burn Line, developed in response to the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, introduces Pyrotype, a process he developed that combines CNC engraving and pyrolysis to transform photographs into charcoal objects. The project was presented as a solo installation at Nohga Hotel Kiyomizu during KG+ Kyotographie 2026, where it received the GOJO+ Award.
Salomon's work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Pingyao International Photography Festival, Head On Photo Festival, and venues in Kyoto, Tokyo, Paris, and San Francisco. He was a 2025 LABA Bay Area Fellow and holds a B.A. in Art History from UC Santa Cruz.
Website: arisalomon.com
Instagram: @arisalomonart