REVIEW: Chilling exhibit on climate change at McMichael Gallery may shift viewer's focus
FOR THE LOVE OF ART: A review

YorkRegion.com
Feb. 26, 2015
Adam Martin-Robbins

Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012 is on exhibit at The McMichael Gallery until Apr. 26.

I figure many people reacted as I did when the big ice storm slammed Ontario last winter, turning streets into skating rinks and snapping mammoth tree branches as if they were brittle breadsticks.

I paused to wonder: was this climate change at work?

But, quite frankly, most of the time climate change isn’t really top of mind for me.

Mostly, I’m focused on arguably less significant problems such as figuring out who is going to shuttle my daughters to piano lessons when I have to work late.

As British sociologist Anthony Giddens points out, climate change is too abstract and really not dramatic enough, at least where we live, to grab the average bloke’s attention.

Well, the chilling new exhibition at McMichael Gallery may have shifted my focus a bit and it might just do the same for you.

Dubbed Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012, it features 80 pieces by artists, writers and naturalists from a dozen countries over a span of more than 200 years.

The idea grew out of curator Barbara Matilsky’s doctoral dissertation, written 30 years ago, about landscape pieces created by French artist-naturalist-explorers who were among the first to depict the poles and mountain glaciers.

As Matilsky became aware of the increasing number of contemporary artists venturing to the Arctic and Antarctic, she saw an opportunity to compare historical and contemporary depictions of these rapidly changing landscapes.

Vanishing Ice weaves together science, art and history through drawings, prints, paintings, photographs, videos and installations to bring into sharp focus the impact climate change is having on the hauntingly beautiful, but fragile polar and alpine regions. 

(Full disclosure: I have a long-held fascination with remote regions, especially the north. It might have something to do with reading too much Farley Mowat as a kid or perhaps it’s just embedded deep in my DNA — after all, my dad was born and spent his formative years in the Yukon.)

The science, sprinkled throughout the exhibition, is intriguing. And the history, at least some of it, is downright gripping.

Take, for example, Herbert Ponting’s stunning photo, Grotto in berg, Terra Nova in the distance.

It was snapped during his time as the official photographer for Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctic expedition to the South Pole aboard the Terra Nova in 1910.

It was taken before Scott and four crew members took off on a journey that would see them spend three months hauling supplies on sledges, across ice and snow, through bitter cold, before reaching the South Pole.

And they arrived only to discover Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them. Then on their journey back to base camp things went from bad to worse.

A few weeks in, after repeated tough slogging that left them injured and frostbitten and struggling to reach their food and fuel depots before supplies ran out, one of the crew members died.

Scott and his remaining crew soldiered on.

They made it to within eleven miles of a food and fuel depot when they encountered a blizzard that stopped them in their tracks.

Trapped by the storm for days without sufficient food or fuel, they eventually died. 

Then there’s Frank Hurley’s haunting black and white photo of The Endurance, the ship used in Ernest Shackleton’s famed Antarctic expedition, completely frozen in ice, before it was crushed and sank.

It’s as if he captured an apparition on film.

The remarkable tale of how the ship’s crew survived a harrowing expedition is more uplifting, but equally engaging. Overall, though, it’s the art that does the heavy lifting.

Juxtaposed photos by Arthur Oliver Wheeler and Gary Braasch of the Athabasca Glacier in Jasper National Park, taken 83 years apart, clearly show the dramatic impacts of climate change.

Other pieces, such as Chris Jordan’s Denali Denial, force you to confront how rampant consumerism is ravaging the environment.

Jordan digitally transformed Ansel Adams’ iconic 1947 photo Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska by incorporating 24,000 GMC Yukon Denali logos to visualize six weeks of sales of the SUV in 2004. Half of the logos have been changed to the word “denial”.

My personal favourites, however, are the reverential landscape paintings such as Thomas Hart Benton’s Trail Riders and William Parrott’s Mount Hood, Crimson Sunrise, which capture the awe and splendour of North America’s snowcapped peaks.

For me, these paintings make the case more than anything else that we must do whatever we can to preserve these regions.

As Steve Jacobs, exhibition coordinator, noted during my recent visit to the McMichael: 

“With Canada being a northern country and facing a lot of the challenges depicted in these paintings and images, I would hope it serves as a clear wake-up call that climate change is actually happening and just develop a greater appreciation for what we have.”

Vanishing Ice made its debut in 2013 at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Washington. From there it travelled to the El Paso Museum in Texas then on to Calgary’s Glenbow Museum.

The McMichael Gallery, in Kleinburg, is the final stop on the tour.

Vanishing Ice will be on display there until April 26.

My advice — catch this exhibition before it vanishes, too.

To find out more, visit mcmichael.com.