Project archive · September 15 – October 5, 2025

This page preserves the original project announcement and documentation. Dates, invitations, visiting arrangements, and RSVP details below refer to the past event.

MOSTLY THORNS

September 15 – October 5

September 27 & 28, 11am-6pm: reception weekend

October 4 & 5, 11am-6pm: closing weekend

Featuring works by

and ongoing community-building by collaborators past and present

Burns Projects pleased to invite you to Mostly Thorns, featuring work by Hiroshi Clark, Lauren Goldenberg Longoria, and Liz Stringer at the Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve.

Mostly Thorns is loosely assembled around the “Rose, Bud, Thorn” exercise, frequently used to explore what’s working, what’s not, and where areas of opportunity exist. A Rose represents a highlight, success, or positive moment. A Bud represents potential for growth, or something to look forward to. A Thorn represents a challenge, disappointment, or area needing improvement. The work in the exhibition brings together diverse strategies of making as each artist explores this natural metaphor, mining the friction between damage and repair occurring between states of transformation and growth. Each of the participating artists, using the materials of their practice, examines the psychological terrains of various bodies — architectural, environmental, and human — bringing these to light in conversation with the environment that surrounds the workshop gallery.

The exhibition takes place at the Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve near Pioneertown, California, within unceded Serrano and Cahuilla territory. The 306 acre Reserve lies in the transition zone between the Mojave Desert and the high-elevation ecosystems of the San Bernardino Mountains, and is managed by UC Irvine to maintain and enhance its native biodiversity and ecosystem health for the purposes of research, education, and public programs. Significant arts activities at the Reserve began with Arts at Burns Piñon, two UC Irvine graduate seminars in 2022 and 2024 focused on community-building and pursuing creative opportunities at the site. A primary outcome of these seminars was the conversion of the Reserve’s abandoned workshop into a space that can host residencies, exhibitions, and events; all three artists had a significant hand in this process. Mostly Thorns is the inaugural professional exhibition in this transformed space.

Hiroshi Clark uses photography to explore his personal experience with barriers, identity, and familial history. Part autobiographical, these quiet and tacit images unpack moments from the past, manifesting their worth as precious objects in the future. The ruptured asphalt-emulsified roads he takes to work, convenience store detritus, childhood summers in his mother’s birthplace in Japan, and the countryside backdrop of his paternal family’s generational wood shop all converge within photography to fortify his understanding of self, one that is deeply connected to land, labor, and material. Clark hybridizes historical processes and emerging technologies to examine identity through the lens of a Japanese American. Using rich blacks and high contrast, he evokes a profound longing for Japan when photographing tender and distant images of the heavily industrialized Los Angeles landscape.

Lauren Goldenberg Longoria’s works are intimate meditations of material, memory, and time. Emerging from a spirit of cannibalizing, personal ephemera is masticated with repurposed paper and glue and spit back up until it is embedded into dense paper forms. She considers how her papermaking process simultaneously holds a delicate tension between the abject and the transcendent, revealing how grossness and beauty coexist within the material memory of the body. The compact paper works are sympathetic to each other in how they scaffold, disguise, and unearth.

Liz Stringer is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines themes of embodiment and consciousness expressed through fast-paced gestures within ceramics, sculpture, and installation. With a background in microbiology, her work investigates corporeality through a lens of bio-politics, science fiction, and feminist theory. Inspired by the bird counting activities that take place annually at the reserve, Stringer’s installation So Blue is a mirage of the original ecological gesture. Ornamentation functions as a visual language for bodily transformation, intertwining the natural and architectural, the organic and inorganic, the familiar and fantastical. Stringer explores the intersections between physical mo and metaphysical narratives, contemplating societal constructs and inviting contemplation on vulnerability, metamorphosis, and resilience.

Mostly Thorns is available by appointment September 15 – October 5, 2025. Please contact Zebulon Zang — zebulonzang[at]gmail.com — to make an appointment and receive access instructions.

The artists are hosting a reception weekend event September 27 & 28, 11am-6pm. The organizers are hosting a closing weekend event October 4 & 5, 11am-6pm, coinciding with the local HWY 62 Open Studio Art Tours. Please contact Liz Stringer — ejstringer84[at]gmail.com — to RSVP for the weekend events and receive access instructions.

Burns Projects at the Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve are organized by University of California, Irvine Professor Jesse Colin Jackson and 2024-25 Burns Piñon Ridge Reserve Artist-in-Residence Zebulon Zang.

Finally, some images! More to come.

From the Arts at Burns course and project archive. The original record remains available at UC Irvine.