'After Icebergs: Conceptual Photography and Climate Crisis'

Nineteenth-century artists were enamored with polar regions and viewed these extreme locales as unparalleled sources of visual wonder. Freighted with romantic ideas about the sublime and scientific debates about geological time, frozen places factored into the representational interests of many leading American painters like Frederic Edwin Church, whose classic investigation After Icebergs with a Painter (1856) lends this exhibition a title.

As part of the Humanities Center’s multiyear inquiry into landscapes and human meaning, "After Icebergs: Conceptual Photography and Climate Crisis" looks at the persistence of creative fascination with ice during an era when glacial melt and accompanying species extinction are urgent concerns. "After Icebergs" will feature photographic works by Mark Dion and Farrah Karapetian, whose photographs suggest the varied approaches to this subject. Dion is a conceptual and installation-based artist whose ongoing project, Ursus Maritimus (begun 1994), documents the often uncanny framing of polar bears in museum dioramas, even as the species itself disappears from its primary habitat.

Karapetian is an artist and writer whose series "Slips and Pushes" (2013–2015) deploys melting ice as both a formal element and as a metaphor for, among other things, forced migration due to climate change. Karapetian’s color photograms, cameraless images, are eerily luminous while Dion’s blunt black-and-white documentation prompts questions about the purposes of museum displays. A rare selection of works from "Ursus Maritimus" and "Slips and Pushes" make up the installation at the Humanities Center Gallery.

The gallery is open Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

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