Burn Pile / The Andromeda Mirage That I Often See, Morris Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, California, 2023, 8ft x 60ft x 10ft
I have been developing my art practice for my entire life, but only recently started showing my work publicly. I grew up East/South/West, landing in the remote and rural California Sierras 23 years ago. Growing up and living in a diversity of places, and converting from a strongly felt Christianity to a strongly felt Islam — but with a strongly felt respect for all the ways that people find their inner guidance — has given me what I now recognize as the motivation for my art development.
One expression of this has been my Burn Pile project. This began as a roving interactive art installation, functioning both as a truth/sincerity harvesting unit, and as a display and broadcast venue, aspiring to link people in a community of heart-felt incoherence.
Burn Pile / All Kinds of Murmuring Here and There, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA, 2026
“Burn Pile might function like a compass, redirecting our perception of truth to a sector located elsewhere, where logic does not apply.”
— Gabrielle Gopinath,
in Sculpture Magazine
“The contrast between the chaotic nature of the scrambled texts and the motif of such clean, precise components creates an aesthetic of catharsis.”
— Shana Nys Dambrot, Art Critic and Author, from the essay Bachrun LoMele’s Aesthetic of Catharsis
“It’s a Tower of Babel, toppled. Language, meaning, all of it —broken and teetering on the edge of collapse.”
​— Tyler Stallings, Writer, Filmmaker, Artist, and Curator, from the essay Burn Pile: A Collapsed Babel of Fragmented Truths
Burn Pile / Where the Lamb Was Afraid to Climb, NOMAD IV, Torrance, CA, 2025, 10ft x 8ft x 8ft
Truth donors were invited to speak inside a private booth. Their statements were immediately scrambled with prior utterances from previous donors, thereby losing any accurate meaning. Donors then chose whether or not to release these garbled statements to be variously commemorated by me. I offered this interactive booth at various locations, such as shopping malls, thrift stores, flea markets and public parks.
By carefully making objects to commemorate these garbled readings of peoples’ innermost expressions, I aspire to show respect for an ambient sincerity freed of specificity. Does a greater truth—obscure, indefinable—arise from this? Does my own personal labor in embellishing these scrambled utterances by itself enhance them with meaning? I feel these questions have particular relevance for our current moment of truth prodding.
An ongoing and unifying element throughout the project has been the use of patterning suggestive of woodgrain, but also “flow”. I think of people donating their truth or sincerity into a communal gibberish as a process of releasing their words into a flow of change. The woodgrain patterning is also useful in suggesting the structure of buildings - and their collapse became a parallel for the collapse of meaning in the statements.
Burn Pile / The epidemic will surprise your wings, College of the Sequoias, Visalia, CA, 2022, 8ft x 30ft x 10ft
Burn Pile / Titanfall 12034, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA, 2025, 10ft x 42ft x 30ft
Relief prints on paper mounted on gatorboard, oil pen, markers, paper maché, aluminum leaf, aluminum foil, acrylic paint, reverse-painted glass, running LED signs, scrambled, donated truth essences, dimensions variable.
Bachrun LoMele lives in Pinehurst, California, near the Big Stump entrance of Kings Canyon National Park, about 4 hours from Los Angeles or the Bay Area. Studio visits are most welcome, and accommodations are available. Contact him by email here.