As fall’s deadening coolness grips our trees and greens with fire, I find myself reaching back for summer. I rarely run, but these days I spend the sweet, shrinking sliver between my workday’s end and night on the Westside Highway. The thought that maybe I can chase down just a few more minutes of light makes me run faster.

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Inevitably, I run back home as the sun sets, and my steady improvement from this accidental training makes my regular chases for sunlight feel faster and more desperate. Soon enough, the sliver will shrink to nothingness, and I’ll be leaving work in darkness. Solace comes in many forms, however. I appreciate no longer sweating the second I step outside, the tinges of warmth in the leaves, and pumpkin spice. An alternative form of solace came, unexpectedly, from a recent visit to Motohiro Takeda’s solo exhibition, Something to Remember You By, at Alison Bradley Projects.

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After taking the elevator to the 8th floor and walking through the sterile halls, one is confronted by a crackled and scorched wall. It appears as though the artist has torched it to oblivion, with the edges of the damage blackened before flaking off, revealing scabs of ash underneath. Beneath this plume-like index of fire lies a concrete hand atop a mossy found stone, its palm upturned towards the burn. Beneath the mossy stone, a blackened pedestal of wood serves as the ultimate support. The hand looks on the verge of crumbling, as its hard surface reveals vulnerabilities where browning tufts of flora wilt further. This sculpture, Nights in April, introduces the play of materiality and tension between fixity and expiration that resounds in Takeda’s work.

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Packed further into the gallery’s narrow space are a sylvan yet unsettling presentation of cast sculptures, wood and flowers, and charcoal paintings. Their careful, surreal arrangement endows them with a mythical quality. One sculpture, Untitled (Sphere), features a naked wooden sphere balanced on a ruffly concrete bole, sitting on a found block of real wood. The incongruence of material and shape proves mystifying, even independent of the shavings of wood laid concentrically around it, as if for a ritual. In actuality, they are remnants of the log that were carved to form the sphere. However, its prior shape is memorialized by the concrete log beneath, which was cast from a mold of the original.

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Cherry blossoms lodged in concrete slabs hang on the walls, alongside an engulfing charcoal painting for which the show was named. In the center of the space, Untitled (Spear) remains unassuming. Yet Takeda deceives us once again; what appears to be a simple tree trunk is actually a facsimile of such. He again casts the found trunk in concrete, immortalizing its form before firing it into charcoal. This product is then rubbed onto the concrete’s surface, shading its patina.

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To produce the charcoal and ash featured in several of the works, Takeda has adapted yakisugi, a traditional Japanese wood-burning technique that preserves and waterproofs wood, often used for the exteriors of minka, traditional houses. This preservation by burning, however, does not maintain the wood in its original state; rather, it preserves through transformation. Fire, a force that typically extinguishes its fuel, is harnessed here as a means of evolution and adaptation, extending the longevity of the once raw material. The product neither ventures to claim immortality, as minka houses are meant to be taken apart and rebuilt.

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In our everyday lives, our consumption produces a host of byproducts designated for discard – food waste, clothing, product packaging. We generate waste from our quotidian patterns of spending. Even in art spaces, where material is revered and eternally preserved, its own sanctification begets vast warehouses with climate control, air transit to freeports in liminal places, special glass and treatments to prevent any changes to the archive. Perhaps artists might consider taking up plastic as a medium; an environmentalist’s headache may finally relieve the conservator’s. I wonder how differently the earth feels a landfill from a storage facility.

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In the midst of this condition, Takeda’s work offers relief. Finally, the white cube acknowledges the artificiality of its pristineness, as the scorched sheetrock embedded in the wall so forces it to. The charcoal smeared on the mock tree compels us to consider the cost of immortalization; the flowers paralyzed in concrete understand the impossibility of the concrete’s task, beckoning us to know too.

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I begin to feel the impossibility of my own task as I set my gaze on Takeda’s Somewhere in the Garden series; I can no longer indulge my resistance to let go of neither the summer nor the past at large. The works feature tight grids of expired film, which are then contact printed onto gelatin silver: a material exposition of our affinity for the petals and charcoal. There are memories that have been and could have been, decayed by time, leaving all but an abstract, hazy impression. Like the minka, there is even an expiration to what we have mastered the preservation of, whether through fire or film. Denying such might affix a contour into concrete but still does nothing for its flesh’s color or vitality.

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And so I run a little slower these days, after having seen Something to Remember You By, even as the sun sets. It is not by sheer will that I slow myself, but by my eye that now searches for vibrant fire in the leaves, readied for the darkness and rest that ensues shortly after.