Heron Arts in San Francisco presents RECLAMATION this August, a two-man show featuring Augustine Kofie and Erik Otto, who transform personal wreckage into fresh work. Forty new pieces, curated by Tova Lobatz, put both artists in a head-on conversation about loss, recovery, and what can be built out of the ashes.

Kofie, a Los Angeles veteran with roots in early ’90s graffiti, lost his house, studio, and archive in the Eaton Canyon Fire this January. For some, that would have been the end of the story. Instead, he’s back at it, slicing up pressboard, salvaged posters, and mid-century packaging into collages that look as sharp as they are stubborn. Ever the clever mind, he calls his circles “rotationships”—a way to wrestle with balance and structure—but you can read them as a sign of survival too.

Otto, San Francisco born and bred, comes at it differently. After too many funerals and a body that betrayed him, his response wasn’t to tighten control but to let it go. The new paintings are looser, washed in saturated color and improvised gestures, equal parts grief and grace. Where Kofie rebuilds from fragments, Otto dissolves them, turning shock into hazy atmospheres and flickers of light.

Together, the show is less about tidy closure than about the messy processes of life, loss, and finding some way to reclaim yourself. Rather than sounding the trumpet, it’s two artists working through the rubble in public. In a culture that likes glossy endings, RECLAMATION reminds us that sometimes survival and perseverance look like glue, tape, and a few luminous layers of paint.