She comes from the land of the ice and snow!
A Greenpoint artist will launch a hot new show, created under the midnight sun, where the hot springs flow! “Sublimation: An Iceberg’s Story,” a panoramic multimedia exhibit about a shrinking glacier and a stalwart iceberg, will open at Red Hook’s Kentler Drawing Center on Jan. 12. The artist says that her show is the result of a decade-long fascination with the flowing ice of the arctic.
“I started with this subject matter over a decade ago when I saw my first glacier,” said Itty Neuhaus. “I saw glacial crevasses and my tour informed me about geothermal activity under the ice and that blew my mind — it was forces of hot and cold working in conflict under what I thought was solid.”
Neuhaus went on several trips to the arctic, photographing and filming glaciers and the formations of icebergs, but her show focuses on a trip to Greenland last year.
The show consists of a single, enormous photo of the Russell Glacier in Greenland, roughly four feet high and 30 feet long, hanging from the ceiling in three sections. Just seven years ago, the glacier covered the entire mountain, but now it occupies just a small portion of the photo. Neuhaus also used a sharp tool to scratch images of wind, clouds, rivers, and figures onto the giant photo, and two-minute film of icebergs and water will be projected onto the back of the images.
Neuhaus says that the show marks a leap forward in her work — it tells a story, and includes an abstract female figure named “Icylla,” inspired by a formidable iceberg she saw floating strong, even while glaciers melted around it.
“This character Icylla is totally new for me to have a storytelling approach,” said Neuhaus. “It feels like somehow the iceberg and nature spoke to me.”
And unlike her previous work, “Sublimation” has a message — informing viewers about the radical shifts that climate change has wrought in the arctic, she said.
“I feel like in the past my work was kind of quiet, and I really want to make an issue of ice art, and hit people over the head with it,” she said.
The change in her attitude came after meeting with indigenous groups, and learning how their once accessible hunting grounds are now unreachable due to water rising, she said.
“What changed was learning about science and being in the arctic with Inuit people who actually live this,” said Neuhaus.
“Sublimation: An Iceberg’s Story” at Kentler International Drawing Space [353 Van Brunt St. between Dikeman and Wolcott streets in Red Hook. (718) 875-2098, www.kentl
