April First Friday: Walking in Antarctica
By Margaret A. Keough
Join us for a trip to Antarctica!
Opening April 1, 2022, for Kansas City First Friday, M-AAA will be hosting an exhibition preview of Walking in Antarctica from ExhibitsUSA. Though the building will not be open, the preview includes the artist’s audio tour on loudspeakers between 8:00 a.m and 10:00 p.m. each day and a small selection of artwork, visible from the street and sidewalk.
Between 1982 and 2020, the National Science Foundation sent more than 120 artists and writers to the Antarctic to bring back images and stories helping the world understand the highest, coldest, driest continent on the planet. Artist Helen Glazer’s photographs, sculptures, and accompanying audio tours of Walking in Antarctica comprise one of the most comprehensive of these endeavors.
Before visiting “the ice,” Glazer’s work had increasingly become focused on ways in which wind and water shape the natural world. In Antarctica these normally fluid processes were literally frozen in place, allowing her to walk inside glaciers, over transparent panes of lake ice, and around granite boulders sculpted by wind for thousands of years. She photographed these features extensively, not only to capture their unique and extreme forms, but also to compile visual data sets that she could then transform into three-dimensional models. Using photogrammetry software, Glazer took
the compiled images and translated them into 3D-printed objects that she then assembled and painted by hand with acrylics.
The work will be on view and broadcast outside the building through May 6, 2022.
