Blizzard

Blizzard opens on the heels of Robert Dimin's personal travels to Eqi Glacier in Greenland. This journey highlights the impetus for the show — exploration. Experts estimate Eqi will only last ten to fifteen more years as an active glacier. Nearly every conversation about the environment of Greenland is cautionary. Its waves of indigenous migration ending in lost civilizations until the last five hundred years. The remnants of European colonialism in situ to remind us of those early expeditions marked by death. Even the Vikings' stay was impermanent, either dying out or returning home, due to the difficultly of endless darkness and perpetual sunlight. Blizzards are enveloping, bitter, fierce, violent, and deadly. Despite these negative associations, there is a sense of peace while observing a storm from a place of safety. A snow day can slow and force respect for the unyielding natural world often ignored. Opening during a balmy New York summer, Blizzard embraces a deliberate seasonal dissonance. Blizzard is painting forward with varied styles, messages, and subject matter. Brett Stano captures this past winter with intimate cityscapes of Ridgewood and Bushwick. Deborah Wasserman's luscious landscapes flirt with fantasy as their softness offers an escape of warmth from the cold they depict. Caroline Larsen's impasto paintings change the landscape conversation with her signature piped-painting style, exploring upper-middle-class domestic architecture as it intersects with nature. Jessie Edelman, Peter Schenck, and Lauren Cohen pull the focus to wildlife. Cohen's work alludes to a holiday theme and ornament with whimsical mackerel ceramics. Edelman and Schenck paint birds naturally equipped to thrive in the arctic. Gallery artist Elena Redmond is the only painter directly engaging with the human form. She furthers her journey of self by placing her own body in wintry landscapes. The works carry the garment of emotion from humor to fear as they show the fragility of humanity. Lasty the works of Sarah Anderson, and Ohan Breiding foreground some of the larger questions of climate change that winter prompts. Anderson's sublime icebergs illuminate dichotomy of the beauty and destruction of ice. Seemingly peaceful, it is seismic and powerful forces that create these giant, floating, ice mountains calved from glaciers at the poles. Meanwhile Breiding's mournful photography captures the efforts of the residents of Obergoms, Switzerland, to drape the nearby Rhône Glacier with thermal blankets to insulate it from rising temperatures. Despite these hopeful actions of ecological care, the glacier is predicted to vanish by 2050. Blizzard blends artists whose winter landscapes offer distance—a space to consider cold, stillness, and environmental change at a moment when these conditions feel furthest away. Instead of the nostalgia and tradition the season has come to represent, this group exhibition reimagines winter as a space for reverie, where beauty and instability collide. Across painting, photography, and sculpture, these artists treat snow, ice, and frozen landscapes not as backdrops, but as sites of memory, sublimity, and change.