The Tree Cathedral by Giuliano Mauri 

Images from Camille Seaman’s exhibit The Last Iceberg at the Chroma Projects Art Laboratory in Charlottesville, VA through June 29, 2012.

Jim Denevan makes enormous temporary drawings on sand, earth and ice that are eventually erased by waves and weather. Thank goodness we can still see his work in beautiful photos like these and soon a documentary film directed by Meredith Danluck. 

Photographer Edward Burtynsky wants us to look more closely at the things we least want to see.

Burtynsky on his work:

Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Takayuki Hori’s intriguing project Oritsunagumono uses x-rays of endangered birds folded origami-style to call attention to the amount of waste discharged into the ocean and its effects on the wildlife. The translation of the title of his project means “folded and connected”. 

Beautifully heartbreaking: Industrial Scars by J. Henry Fair. This project documents the damage caused by industrial pollution, but it also captures how toxic waste can produce unnaturally vivid colors and abstract patterns.

Exposure by Antony Gormley

Gormley explains his project:

My concept of how sculpture works in the landscape is that it is a still point in a moving world. The whole idea of EXPOSURE is that this work, made at a particular time, rooted to ground, reacts over time to the changing environment. One of the known environmental changes that is happening is the rising of the sea level through global warming. It is critical to me that at the time of its making this work reacts with the viewer, the walking viewer, on the top of the polder and that the surface that the viewer stands on is the surface that the work stands on. The work cannot have a plinth. Over time, should the rising of the sea level mean that there has to be a rising of the dike, this means that there should be a progressive burying of the work.

Atmosphere: and your troubles, like bubbles will disappear is a project by Jasmine Targette.

Atmosphere discusses the alarming number of toxic gases ‘bubbling up’ in the Earth’s atmosphere.work examines the fragility of the Earth’s atmosphere that in the current ecological climate appears constantly on the verge of collapse. Underlying tension in the title of the work highlights the need to quantify ecological concerns.

This impressively large recreation of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in the Arctic Sea was made by artist John Quigley in collaboration with Greenpeace. It will slowly melt away over the coming years until barely anything is left.

Greenpeace said they designed the art to represent how ‘climate change is eating into the body of our civilisation’.

The environmental campaigners claim that this September could mark the lowest sea ice levels on record. They say that world leaders need to take urgent action on climate change.‘We came here and created The Melting Vitruvian Man , recreating da Vinci’s famous sketch of the human body,’ Mr Quigley  said.

‘When Davinci did this sketch it was the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the dawn of this innovative age that continues to this day, but our use of fossil fuels is threatening that.’