Ice Work: In one of his earlier art projects, Tavares Strachan dug up a 3,000-pound piece of Crown Street in New Haven, Conn., parking meter and all, and had it shipped to San Francisco.
The concrete and dirt was for an exhibit titled “Where We Are is Always Miles Away,” according to a report in the Yale Daily News last January.
Strachan, who recently completed a master’s degree in art at Yale University, says he has always been “attracted to how physical space displacement completely changes our reality.”
For his latest work, Strachan is displacing a little bit of Alaska.
It’s a tale of hot and cold.
A 4.5-ton block of ice, cut at the Ice Park in Fairbanks, is to be packed in dry ice and trucked to Anchorage so it can be flown to the Bahamas by FedEx.
Once it reaches the Caribbean, the big ice cube is to be displayed in a solar-powered glass freezer, combining the heat of the sun and the chill of Alaska.
Once inside the glass freezer, it will no longer be ordinary ice. It will be art. The exhibit is titled “The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want.”
The ice block is to be removed from the sawdust storage pile at the Ice Park this evening and stored overnight at Quality Meats before beginning the journey to the Bahamas Friday, Ice Alaska spokesman Mimi Chapin said.
After its month-long showing in Nassau, the ice cube is supposed to go on tour in its solar-powered freezer.
On his Web site, Strachan describes his ice-capade and his art work in an ornate fashion. He says the ice was cut on an “Alaska river” on his visit here in 2005. While he did visit here that March, the ice he’s getting is not the ice harvested in 2005 and it was not from a river. It was cut this past winter at O’Grady Pond at the Ice Park in Fairbanks.
“In effect, the power of the sun will keep this displaced remnant of the Arctic intact, stable and on view in the Caribbean,” he said. “Following this exhibition I plan to maintain the ice in its frozen state for further exhibitions.”
Just keep it cool.
Source: www.news-miner.com
