Byron Wolfe

A Vanished Volcano Visualization Kit

2023, resin-infused native California black oak, Eastern white oak, clear resin, digital pigment prints on linen-mounted bamboo inkjet paper, dimensions impossible to measure or calculate.

Byron Wolfe's A Vanished Volcano Visualization Kit offers models, photographs, and illustrations to help audience members envision Brokeoff Volcano (aka Mount Tehama), an ancient volcano in Northern California that's almost entirely disappeared over the past 400,000 years due to natural erosion. The wooden model of Lassen Volcanic National Park, as it is today, serves as a base for different clear-resin antimodels that visualize the volcano—or more precisely, its absence—according to scientific renderings. Photographs and panoramas that correspond to different locations on the wooden model further help viewers to wrap their heads around the landscape across time. Overall, the kit invites viewers to grapple with the confounding realities evoked by different modes of representing an absence. It speaks to the difficulty of processing environmental loss and imagining what once was, mental feats required for contending with present-day issues like climate change.

The kit is part of a larger creative research project titled Vanished: A Chronicle of Loss and Discovery Across Half a Million Years, including collaborators Sheri Simons (sculptor), Heather Altfeld (writer), Oliver Hutton (designer and photographer), Troy Jollimore (philosopher and poet), Dr. Rachel Teasdale (volcanologist), and Wolfe. Through a range of media, the project investigates a tree, a volcano, a mammoth, and a man, all of which once existed in Northern California, and contemplates questions that emerge when searching for things that no longer exist. Active from 2011-2017, Wolfe revisited the project in 2023 for this piece.