FAIRFIELD, CONN..- Fairfield University Art Museum is opening Helen Glazer: Walking in Antarctica, on view in the Museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries through March 16, 2024.
In 2015, artist Helen Glazer traveled to Antarctica as a grantee of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, to photograph ice and geological formations for eventual production as photographic prints and sculpture. She worked out of remote Antarctic scientific field camps and had access to protected areas that can only be entered with government permits or in the company of a skilled mountaineer.
Inspired and informed by her experiences, Walking in Antarctica is an immersive, interdisciplinary exhibition bringing together photography, sculpture, and audio narrative to take the viewer on a journey through an extraordinary environment of remote places that the tourist ships do not reach and few people get to witness in person. The exhibition is organized as a series of “walks” through remarkable Antarctic landscapes: over frozen lakes, around towering glaciers, and baroque sea ice formations, into a magnificent frozen ice cave, across fields of surreal-looking boulders, and through a lively colony of nesting Adélie penguins.
Visitors to the exhibition who have smartphones, and visitors to the exhibition website will be able to access an audio tour narrated by Glazer, drawn from a blog in which she recorded her experiences.
Through her artwork, Glazer strives to convey the wonder and complexity of the natural world to others, in order to motivate a desire to protect and preserve wild places. Her study of earth science over the past several years heightened her awareness of multiple factors shaping the land over time. In recognizing that complex patterns in nature express physical forces at work, she became more attuned to the interplay between geology, climate, life forms, and human activity in a given location.
This project is organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance and is an adaptation of the artist’s solo exhibition of the same title held at the Rosenberg Gallery at Goucher College (Baltimore, MD) that was funded in part by grants from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and the Puffin Foundation. Creation of this work was made possible in part by a Rubys Artist Project Grant, a program of the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance conceived and initiated with funding from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and by a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant.
Helen Glazer’s work has been exhibited nationally, including in group exhibitions at the Delaware Museum of Art, and the New York Hall of Science, as well as at the American Ambassador’s Residence in Lima, Peru, as part of the State Department’s Art-in-Embassies Program. Glazer is a past recipient of awards from the Maryland State Arts Council including an Individual Artist’s Award in Photography, and was 2014–15 artist-in-residence for the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, where she collaborated with scientists and made photographs and sculpture inspired by their research on urban ecology. She has also published articles about art-making and artists in magazines and journals such as Artes, Artpapers, and Feminist Studies.
