PAULA McCARTNEY: CRITICAL MASS – TOP 50 2012

Black Ice I & Black Ice II ©Paula McCartney

from A Field Guide to Snow and Ice

Two photographs from Paula McCartney's series, A Field Guide to Snow and Ice, have been selected for the exhibition Critical Mass Top 50 2012: Color and Light. Curated by W.M. Hunt, the exhibition is showing at the Southeast Museum of Photography and is presented in partnership with PhotoLucida.

Paula McCartney says: 

"A Field Guide to Snow and Ice is my interpretation of the idea of winter. After moving from San Francisco to Minneapolis I decided to brave the elements and explore the snowy landscape, however, at times without being out in the cold. The series includes images of snowfalls and wildflowers, frozen waterfalls and stalagmites, snowdrifts and piles of gypsum sand, as well as other icy forms in order to explore and reinterpret natural structures and the way they can reference multiple ideas on both micro and macro levels. The ambiguity of scale and substance helps the subjects transcend their source. With less there becomes more. 

I see winter in every environment, in every season and categorize it by pattern, shape, and line rather than merely by substance. I am fascinated by the way the frozen waterfall at Minnehaha Falls, in my neighborhood, dialogues with the dripped accumulation of calcite from the water that formed the stalagmites in Carlsbad Caverns over millions of years. Scattered calcium sulfite deposits on a lava bed in Hawaii speak to a snowfall at night – both yearn to be the cosmos. I found the Alps in the snowplowed piles of sand along the side of the road at White Sands National Monument, my own Arctic ice floes in the ice that broke free from the harbor and floated out into Lake Superior. 

The experience of winter is central to people living in the North; we often talk about the weather. This work invites viewers to look at the winter that surrounds them in a new way, abstracted from the vast landscape-the winter of my imagination. Combining images of true snow and ice with forms reminiscent of these substances initiates conversations regarding truth in photography and recurrent forms throughout nature, as well as suggesting and encouraging a wider and more open way of looking". 

Exhibition details can be found here.

McCartney's A Field Guide to Snow and Ice will be exhibited at the Klompching Gallery during the 2013-2014 season. More information will follow soon.