Melting Ice Installations 2012 – 2018
“Melting Ice,” first exhibited in Kathamandu Nepal, was created for the traveling exhibition, Vanishing Ice: Alpine and Polar Landscapes in Art, 1775-2012. Jyoti conceived this installation as a tangible reminder of the disappearing glaciers around the world. At Bellingham Washington’s Whatcom Museum, he collaborated with Bellingham Cold Storage Company and built a 2.5-meter- square cube of ice from 120 blocks that each weighed 300 pounds. Jyoti embedded colored LED lights into the structure to glow at night and reYect the magical blue-green hues of icebergs.
Every day, the installation changed form and assumed the fantastic shapes of ice described by early arctic explorers in their expedition journals. It lent the exhibition a palpable sense of the beauty of ice and the reality of human-produced climate change.
Rain, wind, and sun transformed the work, which lasted for 28 days. At the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Weisman Art Museum, “Melting Ice” survived for a few months in contrast to the El Paso Museum of Art, where it disappeared in a few days.
Jyoti also inserted fossils, many dating from the great Ice Age, into the installation. They were revealed during the melting process and referenced the importance of glaciers for eighteenth and nineteenth century science. Working with a geologist at Western Washington University, he also created a specimen case for people to view – and touch – mammoth tusks and bison bones, among others. As a time capsules of Earth’s history, fossils continue to offer clues into the planet’s past and future.
The process of assembling and melting was captured live on a web cam. A time-lapse video was produced that compresses 28 days of Melting Ice into less than @ve minutes.
