Snow Encore

 Paula McCartney's A Field Guide to Snow and Ice

 Lisa M. Robinson's Snowbound

Sonja Braas, Forces

Michael Itkoff, Ice Crack, Lake Wallenpaupak, Pennsylvania

Laura McPhee, Igloo Built Following Plans Downloaded from the Internet, 2005

Anne Massoni, Hanna to Snow XXIV, 2009

Snow Part 2

Rune Guneriussen, Evolution, 2005 (Thanks Laura for the link!)


Paula McCartney, On Thin Ice in a Blizzard


Mike Rebholz


Alec Soth, Untitled, 1995


Joseph Cornell, Untitled, 1967


Doug and Mike Starn


Deborah Parkin, September is the Cruelest Month


Daniel Marchand


Justin James Reed, The Real Unknown

Snow Part 2

Hmmm... new snow accumulation, no school Friday, Kool-Aid in the cupboard.... snow cakes tomorrow?



Karen Laval, Untitled #1 (Norway), 2003-2004


Scott Peterman, Papoose, 2003



Thomas Flechtner, Passes #51, 2001


Amy Blakemore, Dog in Snow, 2003


David Hockney, Gregory Watching the Snow Fall, Kyoto, 1983
Alexis Pike, Snow Pile from Claimed: Landscape

Olafur Eliasson, Your Waste of Time, 2006

"Several blocks of ice from Vatnajökull, the largest glacier in Iceland, were removed from the glacial lake Jökulsarion ... Part of the ice is thought to have been formed around AD 1200. Weighing 6 tons in all, the blocks were transported to a Berlin gallery where they were exhibited in a refrigerated space." Via.

Dennis Oppenheim, Annual Rings, 1968


Joseph O. Holmes, The Urban Wilderness


Wilson "Snowflake Bentley: "Fascinated by the snow crystals and their composition this man was the first person to successfully produce a photograph of snow or ice crystals. He did this by magnifying the crystals he gathered at 69 to 3,000 times on glass plates...He attached bellows to the microscope, along with wood splints, turkey feathers and a black board. Through the images he captured he discovered that every ice crystal is unique and grows symmetrically in a 6-sided hexagon around a tiny nucleus." Via.


Bruce Davidson, Winter in Paris

Paula McCartney encore


Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty by Greg Lindquist


James Turrell, Roden Crater with Snow, nd

Bird Watching

One of the books I acquired last month was Paula McCartney's Bird Watching. It's one of the few exhibitions I saw this year where people (including me) were laughing out loud as we read the titles. The book itself represents a bird watching journal (in addition to the photographs, the entries include notes, migration patterns, a Life List as of December 2008, etc.). After the images my favorite part of this book is the State Birds list documenting where McCartney "spotted" the birds. Throughout all my time in Oregon, I never once saw a Cardinal though I wish I had.

Darius Himes states in his catalog essay: "...there are lots of real things in McCartney's images. For starters, those are really fake birds. The craft-store dummies - painted Styrofoam with dyed feathers - are out in that landscape because McCartney put them there while she was scrambling through the brush. I like that - she deserves to see a beautiful bird after doing all that work."

Why I am drawn to this work is obvious (though I didn't immediately recognize that fact until it was pointed out to me today): it's the illusion of what is real, the humor in the absurdity, and the unattainable aspect of seeing anything like this - so why not fake it? Fake birds, fake cakes... they aren't too different (at least they are both made from Styrofoam).