Vanishing Ice

Yesterday my husband and I had the pleasure to revisit the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ontario. This is where we got married. It is also where the new exhibition Vanishing Ice is taking place, showcasing art from 1775 to 2012 that depicts beautiful yet sometimes worrisome icy 

landscapes. The show is a combination of breathtaking beauty, a sense of exploration and adventure, but also a wake-up call to the dangers of climate change and the fragility of these ecosystems.

Some of my favourite pieces include Alexis Rockman's Adelies (2008), a demanding painting depicting worried penguins atop a drifting piece of ice. The size of the canvas and the seductive hues of blues and greens draw the viewer's attention among a sea of art. Each penguin's expression is unique, and the eye of the viewer jumps from one to the next. The detail of the drifting ice however, is what makes this painting stand out, it looks as if actual ice crystals were slowly melting away into the sea.

Cynthia Camlin's Melted 4 (2008) is another highlight of the exhibition. Her use of watercolours and acrylic paints to illustrate a melting iceberg is as exquisite as it is striking. The boundaries of this gigantic iceberg, softly complemented by the ephemeral watercolours, contrast with the geometric shapes and darker tones of its interior, giving the viewer a sense of grandeur and of the opposite forces at play in nature.

A hundred-year-old photographs by Frank Hurley and Herbert Ponting, and classic painting's like the Group of Seven's Lawren Harris' Isolation Peak, Rocky Mountains (1930) allude to discovery, exploration, and the undeniable awe of nature. However, the viewer's attention is carried elsewhere with pieces like Paul D. Miller's Manifesto for a People's Republic of Antarctica (2011-2012) and Jean de Pomereu's Fissure 2 (Antarctica) from Sans Nom (2008), which clearly illustrate the speedy melting of the ice caps and bring awareness to the action that must be taken to preserve this awe-inspiring landscapes.

Vanishing Ice will be on at the McMichael from January 31st until April 26th, 2015. For more information you can visit their website at: http://www.mcmichael.com/vanishingice. The exhibition was originally organized by the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, WA. You can see the individual works at their website at http://www.vanishing-ice.org.

"The ice and the long moonlit polar nights, with all their yearning, seemed like a far-off dream from another world - a dream that had come and passed away. But what would life be worth without its dreams?" - Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North (1897).