Fire power
For anyone who witnessed the crowds of people shuffling by Buffalo’s now demolished Memorial Auditorium as it was slowly reduced to rubble, the human obsession with destruction and demolition is easy to see. It’s the same thing that makes us peek through our fingers at video of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, still endlessly repeated on television newscasts, even while being overcome with a sense of guilt for looking. That obsession sits at the heart of the photographs of J-M Reed, a Buffalo-based artist whose work has been making frequent appearances in local galleries over the past three years. In his photographs of raging house fires, Reed explores his fascination with a fascination— namely the spectacle of watching a structure rapidly transformed from wood and plastic into flame, smoke and ash. The work also has, secondarily, to do with issues of urban decline and, by inference, a city’s fascination with the process of its own decay. An exhibition of Reed’s prints and postcards opens today in the Olean Public Library (134 North Second St., Olean). “Day + Night / Buffalo On Fire” contains images of fires on Buffalo’s West Side that a release about the show says “are at once about abject poverty and luscious beauty.” This exhibition follows “Ecologies of Decline,” an important three-person exhibition that included Reed’s work and closed on Oct. 19. Call 372-0200 or visit www.oleanlibrary.org . —Colin Dabkowski
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