Image courtesy of
Ashes and Snow

Last January, on a breezy and breathtaking Sunday afternoon, I took my wife to see Ashes and Snow. What is there to say about about an exhibition that stirs your heart and captures your imagination? It starts with the venue! What at first seemed like the ill-conceived idea of using shipping containers as building blocks, turned out to be a brilliant idea. Upon closer inspection, it was easy to see that the exhibition's building was just not a stack of containers arranged into a box. It was a delicately designed structure of interlocking blocks. Some giant genius had used shipping containers as his Lego's and created an architectural masterpiece by the side of the Santa Monica Pier. The real beauty of the building was obvious when one learns about its function. It is a Nomadic Museum designed to house the Ashes and Snow exhibition as it travels around the world.

The flavor of the exhibition was teasingly revealed by the unusual pictures I had already seen for its announcements: Impossible pictures of people and animals living in a universe of the imagination. Except that all the pictures are real. According to the artist no image had been manipulated. Yet the pictures seem unreal because those of us immersed into modern lives regularly forget that we are part of the web of life. We either pretend that the huge mechanized industries that slaughter our daily sustenance do not exist or we anthropomorphize animals into surreal caricatures of their wild counterparts. We have forgotten that there are still wild places on this Earth where people and wild animals still interact on a daily basis and not always with a biological imperative.

Nothing had prepared me to enter the cathedral built to house Gregory Colbert's art. Maybe it was the cavernous, dimly-lit space created by all those shipping containers. Maybe it was the soothing background music and voices intoning barely understood mantras. Or maybe it was the controlled way in which one proceeds through the exhibition carefully placing each step in order to catch the beauty and essence of each picture from different angles, walking back and forth between both sides of the aisle. Maybe it was the self-conscious realization that certain pictures seemed to attract only certain people while all were looking for a meaning that is carefully unfolded as one progresses through the exhibition. Maybe it was the complementary short films that provide more sensuous input just when one needs it, tying all those pictures into another medium and revealing more of this unusual artist that has taken ten years of his life to create this experience. Maybe it was finding out that an integral part of the exhibition was in yet another medium, A Novel in Letters, "...a fictional collection of letters written by a man to his wife over the course of a yearlong journey..." that promises to reveal the source of the Ashes and Snow title "...on the 365th day of writing." Maybe it was the fact that it was a Sunday; The experience was religious!

I have not read the novel, so I'm not sure about the real source of the Ashes and Snow title for the exhibition. Maybe Colbert already gives it away on one of the film's mantras or maybe he is still weaving his artistic vision and I will have to read 365 fictional letters to find out what the following means: "Flesh to fire, fire to blood, blood to bone, bone to marrow, marrow to ashes, ashes to... snow."

Labels: art