Liz Toohey-Wiese hosts an open viewing of her wildfire-inspired artwork at the Caetani Centre on June 25.

Anyone driving along Highway 97 north of Vernon on the way to Kamloops this past year likely saw the blazing billboard. Created by Caetani Centre artist-in-residence Liz Toohey-Wiese, the billboard featured a painting of a wildfire with the words “Come Back Soon!” emblazoned on the top. The billboard was part of Toohey-Wiese’s exploration on the topic of wildfires and their connection to tourism, economy, grief, and renewal.

Toohey-Wiese is back in Vernon and is opening her Caetani Centre studio for the public to see her latest wildfire-inspired collection. Her studio will be filled with paintings and sculptures based on a site visit last year to the Mount Christie fire outside Penticton.

Liz Toohey-Wiese is a visual artist exploring relationships between identity and place. Born and raised in the suburbs of Vancouver, her work seeks to intervene in the broader notion of “landscape” in her surroundings. Her recent series “Wildfire Tourism” considers overlap between landscape painting, the tourist economy, climate change, and resource extraction. Her paintings frame wildfires as a challenging site of contradictions: at once they point to the devastating repercussions of climate change, and a site of renewal of landscape. Her pieces borrow tourism marketing strategies, creating tension between image and text, object and imagery, as wildfires emblazon postcards, commemorative posters, and souvenir objects. Her work frames wildfires as a wider metaphor for the human desire to control nature and looks at the repercussions of man’s intervention on natural processes.

Visit  Caetani Centre, located at 3401 Pleasant Valley Rd., June 25, from 6 to 9 p.m.

Covid protocols will be in place. For more information, visit www.caetani.org or call 250-275-1525.