The Arctic is making a cameo in New York this month, as the Brooklyn Museum houses The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want by Tavares Strachan. "In 2005, Tavares Strachan journeyed to the Alaskan Arctic and worked with a skilled team to extract a single two-and-a-half ton piece of ice from a frozen river. This ice block was shipped to the Bahamas (the artist's birthplace) and exhibited there in hot summer weather, kept cold in a specially designed freezer powered by solar energy," which is now at the museum. The sun keeping the ice freezing? Far out man.
Of course, this couldn't have come at a more appropriate time, just yesterday it was reported that new satellite images show massive amounts of ice breaking away from the Wilkins Ice Shelf on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, which for the most part has been stable for the last century. Since last Friday around 270 square miles of ice, that's almost the size of New York City, has broken and dropped off into the sea. Strachan's ice block is, of course, meant to draw attention to current and potential climactic changes, like this atmospheric warming that yielded the demise of the ice shelf. It's now on view outside of the Museum's south entrance, and on view through September 2009, at which point it will be evaluated to see if it can last through the winter.
