In May of 2006, as a workman refinished trim on the second floor, a steel wool spark ignited a raging fire that would ultimately destroy most of the interior of artist Kendall Messick’s historic home on Summit Avenue in the Heights. The blaze consumed his personal possessions, ruined some of his artwork, and left the house a smoking shell filled with burnt rubble. But when Messick finally reentered the building, his first instinct was not to salvage whatever he could from the charred and water-damaged property, but rather to emotively document and photograph the house’s transformation. So Messick took pictures. Coping with what he says seemed like an “unrecoverable loss,” he focused on the abstract imprints the flames and firemen had left, rather than the raw scenes of overwhelming destruction they composed. He sought out patterns burnt into closets, the water stains spread across the remaining Sheetrock, the tufts of insulation clustered on the floor. He processed his own loss in pieces, detail by detail.