- CRYOSPHERE: Frozen in Time presents still and moving images, narrated by letters written to a past self, to articulate the encounter between the half-century-old artist and the two-and-a-half-million-year-old cryosphere, the solid water of Earth. Glaciers advance and recede. Memories of three short decades fast forward and rewind in funerary remembrance. The memoriam shows viewers an intimate, one-sided glimpse of love lost to a changing landscape. The movie offers a meditative space for considering ice sheets - now vanishing on a human time scale - and allows viewers to contemplate the coinciding deaths of humans and glaciers.
- Before strapping crampons to my cold weather boots, I pulled out the waterproof film camera I purchased a few weeks earlier in Hong Kong, to photograph my platoon on the towering ice bridge above. The cave was a remnant of a moulin at the terminus of Gulkana Glacier, Alaska, where two soldiers died the previous year. I used my first 35MM camera to capture the image of the first glacier I ever climbed. Thirty years later that photograph was printed and hung for the Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Interstices, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as part of the exhibit, CRYOSPHERE: Frozen in Time.
The University of Utah Department of Military Science sent me to the United States Army Northern Warfare Training Center. That summer in 1988 I found myself imaging the cryosphere in military science. Just as Eadweard Muybridge and Ansel Adams captured single frame black and white photographs of glaciers in Yosemite and the Teton Mountains from the 1860's and 1910's, I have captured images of glaciers from 1988.
CRYOSPHERE: Frozen in Time features original cinematography of Hubbard Glacier, Alaska, calving in reverse, showing the reverse entropy of the event; my 2017 aerial approach of Palisade Glacier, California, which has had it's life turned upside down; and the Teton Glaciers' experience of two "sunsets" during a 2012 solar eclipse to play back forty eight times faster than Earth, the Sun and Moon moved that day, narrated by my recollection of half a lifetime ago in a human time frame, and less than one hundredth of the glacier's existence. The movie offers a meditative space for considering the coinciding deaths of humans and glaciers.
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