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| "La Tuna Fire," by Jeff Frost |
“Receding lines of ice…advancing lines of fire.”
That’s
Tim Blunk’s view of the art show he’s curated at Gallery Bergen at Bergen
Community College in Paramus, NJ.
“Artists
have historically served as the conscience of humanity; now they may serve as
the conscience of the earth itself,” Blunk noted in a curator’s statement for
the show, which opened January 24 and runs through March 30. The artists in
this show, he added, “hope to instill in the viewer a perceptual shift where
the environment ceases to be conceived as a place separate from us…”
Jeff
Frost pulls visitors’ eyes to stare across the room at a life-size photo of a
Los Angeles freeway closed by a smoke-swirling wildfire blazing up a
mountainside. The La Tuna Canyon fire in September 2017 endangered homes in
Burbank, Glendale and neighboring parts of Los Angeles. It was one of numerous
wildfires that have blazed up in southern California communities in recent
years.
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| "Flag (wildfire 08)" by Peter Alan |
Peter
Alan pulls viewers close to look at burnt remnants of his home and studio,
destroyed in the wine country wildfires in northern California in October 2017.
Alan fashioned charred pieces of wood and other objects into a series based on
the shape of the American flag as part of a defiant survivor’s body of work entitled
“Wildfire: an assault on humanity, hitting home.”
James
Balog reveals the breathtaking melting of a glacier in Alaska captured in
time-lapse photos taken between 2007-20017. Videos set at high speed pull
viewers closer to contemplate the climate change in the past decade that relentlessly
shrunk ice packs near the north pole. Balog’s photography work for the Extreme
Ice Survey aims “to give a ‘visual
voice’ to the planet’s changing ecosystems,” states his website,
extremeicesurvey.org.
Marie McCrary tells a more subtle story in a
photo of a lake in Norway, just starting to freeze over last October. “The
fastest warming region in the world is the Arctic,” notes McCrary, a physics
professor at Bergen Community College. She is researching the physical process
of rising temperatures in the Arctic and impacts globally.
Other artists in the show—Helena Donzelli,
Andrea Geller, Karen Lynn Ingalls, Mitsuko Nakagawa, Jaanika Peerna and Carleen
Sheenhan—offer insightful variations on the theme of people and nature intertwined.
Gallery Bergen is in West Hall at Bergen
Community College, 400 Paramus Road, Paramus, NJ. It is open Monday-Friday, 11
am to 5 pm.
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