BY LAUREN MANDEL, ASLA
Artist Zaria Forman?s large-scale pastels describe a vanishing Antarctic.
FROM THE AUGUST 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
The Brooklyn-based artist Zaria Forman draws in fine detail to capture expansive corners of the Earth. Her large-scale, hyperrealistic pastel works feature, most recently, Antarctic landscapes affected by climate change. ?I?m trying to offer people a time and a place to connect with these very far-flung places,? Forman says. ?If they can fall in love with [these places] in a similar way that I have, then that will lead them to want to protect and preserve them.? Forman has been completing a drawing series and video installation for an upcoming solo exhibition, Antarctica, inspired by her first trip to the polar continent as an artist in residence aboard the National Geographic Explorer in winter 2015. Whale Bay, Antarctica no. 4 captures the fragility of a remote harbor off the Antarctic Peninsula that is filled with melting icebergs that calved, drifted, and ran aground on the shallow seafloor. Forman says that as the icebergs melt, ?it?s like the wind and the water are just hands, just making these most incredible shapes that you can?t even conceive of until you?re there.? Bays that enclose icebergs like these are called iceberg graveyards, a term that ?captures the eerie solemnity of the site,? Forman says, ?but to me serves as a metaphor for the bigger picture.? According to NASA?s Global Ice Viewer application, ...