BLACK ICE

BLACK ICE is a joint exhibition by Shoshannah White (Portland, Maine) and Charley Young (Halifax, NS) based upon residencies and travels to the high arctic. As a part of the Arctic Circle Residency Program, the artists traveled separately to Svalbard, Norway, located within 1300 km’s of the North Pole.   In 2016, Young and White traveled together to Prince William Sound, Alaska to further develop work based on the contingent and ever changing landscape of the polar region. The exhibition features interdisciplinary from these experiences and includes frottage, sculpture, and photographic works, capturing receding glaciers through a dual perspective. Together, the work explores new landscapes resulting from human impact and technological advance. 
Shoshannah White’s photographs employ a number of contemporary and historic processes. Fallen glacier ice specimens, recorded by way of the photogram, reference new topographies. Photographs of icebergs, receding glaciers and sea ice contextualize the practically uninhabited yet highly impacted Arctic landscape. Working with translucent and reflective materials like wax and metal dust, White’s artwork transforms with light and perspective. 

BLACK ICE also features the site-specific work of Charley Young.  Created in situ in the high arctic, the work Swell intimately records through frottage, the detailed and textural surface of icebergs.  Accompanying these rubbings are fragmented wax and aluminum sculptures that indexically record the form of fractured glacier ice, water-lapped and worn. 

Exploring transformation and permanence, a theme central to the exhibition, ArtShape Mammoth will be hosting an aluminum casting workshop on Saturday, April 8th. Open to artists, this workshop will explore mold making and foundry processes. Contact Elizabeth@space538.org for more details.

Together, White and Young’s work offer different reflections on the same landscapes. Working with glacier ice—a raw and transient material- the artwork in BLACK ICE is tactile and direct, depicting an abstracted landscape that is touched and fleeting.