The Tree Cathedral by Giuliano Mauri
Posts marked environmental
A Portrait of Ice by Caleb Cain Marcus
About:
Glaciers—massive and frozen reservoirs of freshwater—range in size from the length of a football field to the breadth of a continent. Photographs, on a much smaller scale, are reservoirs too. They store up a good deal of the data we rely upon to engage with, function in, and document the world. They blanket culture, media and everyday life, just as glacial ice covers vast portions of the globe. Bore down below the surface of glaciers—or photographs—and layers of stratified evidence and meaning re-emerge. Scientists drill, sometimes more than a mile deep into the earth, to extract core samples from ice fields, flecked with dust, ash, traces of atmospheric gas or radioactive substances, even fragments of meteorites. Upon examination they reveal the details of hundreds of thousands of years of climatic history and change. Look deeply and critically enough at the information and narratives embedded in any single photograph and something similar happens as evidence of flash-frozen moments and their motivation resurfaces and falls into place.
What Lies Beneath by Gabby O’Connor represents an iceberg brought indoors.
About the work:
At a time when we are becoming increasingly aware of global warming and climate change, and what it means for humans, the melting of ice occupies a sensitive place in the collective consciousness. One of the projected impacts of climate change is a rise in average sea level, due in part to the melting of land-based ice. The gallery installation projects this possibility onto a physical space, where we are imagined underwater.
Wired UK has assembled images from J Henry Fair’s book The Day After Tomorrow into a chilling slideshow: In Focus: The blue planet’s toxic new colors. Check it out to learn more about the locations pictured and the toxins that are contaminating our environment.
About the book:
The Day After Tomorrow takes readers on a journey to bear witness to the environmental destruction that is currently plaguing our planet; from a forest in West Virginia devastated by mountaintop removal mining, to a region in Florida left in ruins by the phosphate mining industry, J Henry Fair presents hard evidence that our unchecked consumerism is leading the way in the destruction of our planet, one natural resource at a time.
Primarily through the use of aerial photography, Fair captures spellbinding vistas of pools of toxic hog waste, streams of paper mill runoff, and the remains of hollowed-out mountains. These environmental abstractions lure the viewer in with unique asymmetrical shapes and striking colors; however, fascination quickly turns to horror, as the viewer realizes what lurks beneath the surface of the image.
This mural of a tree by Andreco mimics its subject by actually improving the air quality of its surroundings.
Instead of using traditional exterior paints he used a special kind of photochemical paint that reduces the amount of nitrogen monoxide in the air. According to the artist, the artwork represents a big tree, inspired from the Philosophical Tree of the Alchemists of the 14th century. The painting is also designed to resemble a big egg and a crystal, symbols that represents the transition from the organic to inorganic material.
Above Zero by Olaf Otto Becker
About the project:
Following Broken Line, a prizewinning portrait of the coast of Greenland, Olaf Otto Becker turns his attention to the interior of the island in his new series, Above Zero. Second only to Antarctica, Greenland has the largest inland ice surfaces in the world. Becker’s spectacular portraits of this region are taken during physically strenuous, sometimes life-threatening treks among glacial crevasses and melting ice floes, with a cumbersome large-format camera. His photo studies draw out the overwhelming beauty of this icy landscape, while documenting their present fragility: dust and rust in the air form black, crusty deposits, which, in conjunction with global warming, accelerate the melting of the ice sheets—with what will probably be inevitable, catastrophic results. Becker warns that even in these uninhabited regions, human actions can have fatal consequences.
That isn’t fog in these images of Pittsburgh taken in 1940. That’s what the city looked like all the time before coal burning regulations.
For more than a century, Pittsburgh was marked as a smoky city. In 1941 an effective smoke control ordinance was passed in the city of Pittsburgh regulating the burning of coal, but the onset of World War II delayed the enactment of the legislation until 1946.
Images from Camille Seaman’s exhibit The Last Iceberg at the Chroma Projects Art Laboratory in Charlottesville, VA through June 29, 2012.
These whimsical repurposed gas pumps designed by James Dive are part of the Zero Petrol promotion for the release of the all-electric Nissan LEAF EV in Australia.
Images from a great Wired gallery of stunning views of glaciers seen from space. Check it out to see more photos and to find out more about them.
Glass Beach is a protected beach, but not for its natural beauty. Located just outside of Fort Bragg, California it became an illegal dumping ground for residents in the late nineteenth century who lacked any kind of refuse pickup. It wasn’t until 1967 that the illegal dump was finally closed by city leaders and the local water board. The beach was cleaned of large refuse, but small pieces of glass and plastic that had been worn down by the elements remain, giving the beach its name and its unusual beauty.
Bosco Verticale is a project by Stefano Boeri that is currently under construction in Milan, Italy.
About the project:
Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) is a project for metropolitan reforestation that contributes to the regeneration of the environment and urban biodiversity without the implication of expanding the city upon the territory. Bosco Verticale is a model of vertical densification of nature within the city. It is a model that operates correlated to the policies for reforestation and naturalization of the large urban and metropolitan borders (Metrosbosco). Metrobosco and Bosco Verticale are devices for the environmental survival of contemporary European cities. Together they create two modes of building links between nature and city within the territory and within the cities of contemporary Europe.
Images from the Telegraph’s fantastic gallery Patterns from space: beautiful satellite images of river deltas around the world. Check it out for many more.
These spectacular photos of icebergs are by David Burdeny.
Burdeny on his project:
During 2007 and into the spring of 2008, I made several long journeys to the upper and lower extremes of our planet to photograph the shorelines, monolithic ice forms and landscapes of Greenland, Icelandic and Antarctica. Most of these places are arduous to reach, beyond the borders of domestic transportation routes, accessible only by small aircraft or boat. All are endangered to some extent – threatened by tourism, climate change, industry and the hunt for oil.
This new series, Icebergs begins to explore what are currently the most geopolitical and geographically sensitive shorelines on earth.
Formally different than my previous work, but motivated by similar principals, these images attempt to encapsulate both the otherworldliness and the vital reality of the northern seas and oceans. I was drawn to the fragility and grace of the frozen landscape. For me, the work is both a celebration of nature’s survival and an elegy.
Artist Isaac Cordal’s dark sense of humor is just one of the tools he uses to point out the futility of a popular strategy for climate change: to just do nothing.
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