INFLUENCES
OLAFUR ELIASSON
Ice watch paris
Ice Watch by Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson consists of a circle of icebergs harvested from southern Greenland and assembled on a street in Paris. The placement of the icebergs suggest two ideas Ice Watch:it resembles a clock, to suggest that time is running out with climate change; and it also references a compass, creating a space within which viewers may ‘navigate’ the issue of melting ice caps. Eliasson’s work engages its audience by disrupting the course of normal as a harsh reminder of the state of climatic affairs. This juxtaposition of the urban and natural elements what draws viewers into Ice Watch. and its interruption of the urban landscape forces the public to acknowledge the ways in which the issue is repressed in popular consciousness.. In many ways Phase Change mirrors Ice Watch, most notably in its aims and in its production itself. Both Phase Change and Ice Watch undertook the harvest and passive storage of ice in ice houses, mindful of the excessive energy large-scale refrigeration consumes, and both projects also attempt to bring to the cities an issue from which the public is both spatially and consciously alienated.
JYOTI DUWADI
Vanishing ice
In 2009, artist Jyoti Duwadi collaborated with Bellingham Cold Storage to create Melting Ice, a project referencing the dramatic loss of alpine and polar glaciers around the world. Created from old, waste blocks of ice from Bellingham ice houses, Melting Ice notably represents the antiquity of the glaciers and their longstanding presence throughout natural history. Fossils—some dating back as early as the Ice Age—were embedded in the blocks of ice, illustrating clearly how an environmental legacy that has persisted for more than 2.6 million years is now falling into ruin at the hands of human activity. Much like Melting Ice, Phase Change attempts to quantify the temporal aspect of climate change. Particularly in its potential future scenario, Phase Change moves to illustrate how rapidly the polar ice caps are melting in response to rapid industrialization and related human activity.
