Saturday, March 29, 2014

March 29 The Ice Man Goeth

Usually we do not note school galleries. Some, like Linfield College in Mcminville and the UO museum in Eugene are consistently excellent. PCC Cascade and Sylvania have cycles, as does Clark College in Vancouver. Reed often pulls stunners. We count on other other blogs to cover. We cover UO Portland because they are excellent and you can bike.

But a little trafficked photography gallery is on the menu this month. And they are not a drive.

The Camerawork Gallery is downstairs Peterson Hall at Linfield College Nursing Campus. This month they have a National Geographic-landscape photographer, Camille Seaman with The Last Iceberg.

It is the type of photography foreign to the art world because it is commissioned. The travel costs are high and the time involved is substantial. As art, this type of landscape photography struggles with a one note chord of beauty.

But this material is an important topic. We are all for beauty in art and these are beautiful. Very. They also have a very heavy narrative which art likes.

Seaman has photographed icebergs afloat. Icebergs separate from the ice floes and glaciers covering Greenland, parts of Alaska and Antarctica. Smaller ones are pieces of the Arctic sea ice - the vast ocean around the North Pole.

Explorers for oil and gas, as well as seabed minerals, are in hot pursuit of drilling all those places. Without ice it would be significantly easier. Their devils' handiwork is the destruction of that ice and other externalities to the detriment of life. And we are all complicit in our use of energy.

Other artists have approached the topic including Susan Robb with her proposed Sea Ice Life Boat. Here is new research result of loss of ice from satellite earth studies.

You can see Seaman's work at Camerawork Gallery www.TheCameraworkGallery.org, Linfield College Nursing Campus Peterson Hall, 2255 NW Northrup. See the website for hours. Free