Art Show Rises From Ashes : Exhibit at gallery in Topanga Canyon is inspired by November inferno and has drawn unusually high community interest.

There is nothing like a disaster to foster a sense of community.

After the recent Malibu/Calabasasfires, four artist-members of the co-op New Canyon Gallery in Topanga felt a need to bring together the expressions of people who had experienced the maelstrom for all to see.

Instead of organizing just an exhibit of work by gallery members, they opened the juried show to anyone in the greater community who wanted to submit work created in response to the November fires or any fire. Not without a sense of humor, they publicized the “Fires: A Community Art Show” as a “hot item” on bright orange flyers burned around the edges.

The show opens Saturday with a reception from 4 to 8 p.m. Music, storytelling and poetry will take place at the Cypress Cafe next door beginning at 7 p.m.

The gallery is filled with photography, painting, sculpture, mixed-media work and found objects burned or melted beyond recognition. Participants range from people who lost homes to individuals from such communities as Venice and Northridge who were not directly threatened by the fires. A few children and teen-agers also contributed work.

“This will be a forum for the community to find self-expression, to bear witness to one another’s experience, to hopefully realize and participate in all kinds of different experiences. And if that’s done communally, there will be some kind of healing that takes place,” Jody Sibert said. She organized the show with Barbara King, Megan Rice and Nancy Williams.

Sculptor Burt Rashby carved his sweet-faced “Guardian Deity” out of wood. A divine vision of a helicopter, it is an homage to the firefighting helicopter pilots who saved his house in Fernwood as he stood there and watched. When he delivered the piece to the gallery, he told King that he already missed having it in his house and that he felt vulnerable.

Barry Lysaght, who has a woodworking shop in Topanga Canyon, expresses similar feelings in his wood carving “Safe.” A firefighter carries a child away from danger.

On a lighter note, photographer Petrie Alexandra of Topanga has before-and-after pictures of a location on Saddle Peak. She had photographed a female model there before the fire. In some shots, a live chicken was included. After the fire, she brought the same model back to the spot. In these shots, the model holds a roasted chicken.

Hadia Finley found the remains of some of her clay pieces in the rubble of her destroyed home in Fernwood. A half-blackened torso stands now on a new wood base. Along with that work and pieces from others are her photographs and journal entries.

Mary Ellen Strote contributed the burned-up mailbox from her tenant’s burned-down house in Calabasas. Mariah Woodruff, whose studio is in Topanga Canyon, found metal objects melted into intriguing abstract shapes. These include the small but powerful “Fire Dragon,” which she mounted on a base. It came with a “fire opal eye.”

The installation “She Lives” is the work of Mary, Eric and Devon Wright of Malibu. Eric, an architect and the grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright, lost all of his drawings in the fire. Devon, Mary and Eric’s son, stayed on the property to try to save it. He also managed to take some photographs, which are on view.

The backdrop to “She Lives” is a large aluminum piece, what’s left of their incinerated trailer. Included in the altar-like work are a pile of burned and rusted nails, and two pieces found in the rubble that the work commemorates: a small reproduction of an ancient Greek goddess figure and a small stone rune, the meaning of which is renewal. A patch of fresh sod will be watered during the run of the show.

“I think that the found objects are the least predictable element in some ways,” Sibert said. “We knew we would pull in a lot of photographs. This is not in any way to trivialize that medium. It’s extremely powerful. But in some ways, (a found object) is one of the more raw expressions of the experience, especially when clearly it relates to someone who has suffered damage through the fires.”

Sibert, who has made collages and a three-dimensional piece for the show, lives in Venice. She described herself as a “voyeur” during the fire. “I sat on the beach in Venice with my binoculars looking at the hills burning and I cried. However, I knew that it would be highly improbable for me to suffer direct damage. I’m not trivializing myself either as a voyeur or my expression of the fire, but there is an element that I feel is undeniably different between the objects brought in by people who have suffered and pictures taken by the voyeurs.”

“I’d like to let people actually feel what it was like to be here and get people talking,” said King, a Fernwood resident. She and her husband, Scott, remained at their home during the fire. “The more I talk about it, the better I feel.”

When firefighters pulled onto their dead-end street late at night, they asked the Kings to leave. “We said, ‘We’re not leaving,’ ” King said. “They sized us up to see what sort of crazies had stuck around, and then they parked Engine 48 in our driveway for four days. They gave us jackets and helmets and gloves. When the fire was right there, they put me on the roof and told me to look for embers down along our property. The wind was such that all the embers just went up and away.

“I was scared after, but during it, it was just happening. We’d go in and watch the TV and get all freaked out. They got all the names all mixed up and they had streets going into streets that didn’t even exist, and it just looked like such a mess. And we said, ‘Well, let’s go out and look at the fire and see what’s going on.’ We’d go out and look and say, ‘OK, I can deal with this.’ ”

King teaches ceramics at Rustic Canyon Arts and Crafts Center in Santa Monica Canyon. After showing a class a video of a new technique, she was “just sort of doodling with the technique and I did this piece--I didn’t even think about it--it was of a person running, and it looked like it had already been through the fire,” she said. “I glazed it black, and that’s one of the things I want to put in the show because I realized now I was running away from the fire.”

In another work, King has framed an oil pastel drawing of the fire with sumac wood that burned on her hill. The frame’s glass looks as if it’s melted.

It was King who asked Williams, a Rustic Canyon Arts and Crafts Center student, to join her in planning the show. Williams, who paints under her maiden name Swenson, contributed watercolors of Santa Monica Bay and Tuna Canyon.

Rice was not at her Topanga home when the fire started and was not allowed back in the area. “My daughter was taken by bus from the school to the Valley and I stayed at my in-laws for three days and watched the television,” she said. “I wrote a stream-of-consciousness thing one of the days of the fire, and I started a woodcut, a triptych.” Both works will be on view.

Rice said she is delighted by the “numbers of people who are excited” by the show. “Usually when we have shows here, you have to beg people to come. So much effort goes into bringing people in. This feels different. So many of these people, we didn’t even know they were doing any work.”

Where and When

What: “Fires: A Community Art Show.”

Location: New Canyon Gallery, 129 S. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga.

Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Ends Jan. 30.

Opening reception: 4 to 8 p.m. Saturday.

Call: (310) 455-3923.