Ice

To Site Santa Fe, to see Tristan Duke's wonderful show Glacial Optics.  I met him when he came to the Huntington conference back in March, and he told me about this, and was very apologetic that it wasn't in LA, but in Santa Fe.  Well, I said ...

I really love his project - making ice a collaborator in his records of climate change.  Below, an image from his Ice Core series, taking ice cores that were stored in a lab - some from what's now melted glaciers - placing them on giant sheets of photo paper and exposing them with - yes - flash, to bring out all the annual deposits in a glacier that have accumulated through deep time.

And here, he uses glacier ice itself as a lens - constructing what he calls a "glacial gaze."

In yet others, he used ice lenses to record the aftermath of the Marshall Fire in Colorado, and the Hermit's Peak Fire, not far up the road from us.

And somewhere in all of this (because there was much more to think about) I feel the germ of a NAVSA conference paper coming on ... watch this space.

 

tranquillity

Compared to the scene we came home to, half an hour ago - this is an earlier image of utter tranquillity.  We went out to dinner at Harry's - wonderful dinner, with friends - and came back to ... Over-Excited Cats!  There was a bird in the house!!  A House Finch!!!  Sorry, no pics ... I was too busy trying to escort him out of the house (after we'd shut the cats away ...) - which involved turning off the lights - watching him perch on top of the lights, on the dried lavender in a pot on the fire place, on picture frames (though disappointingly, not in the Christmas tree with all the artificial red birds).  I stood outside under the portales, playing him house finch calls on the iPhone ... Eventually, he departed - one hopes not too traumatized (he didn't seem in a huge panic - to be honest, one had the impression that it was much nicer and warmer inside than in freezing Eldorado) - but I can't imagine that the (now released) cats are ever going to calm down ...

 

and the first of 2025 ...

... well, yes, this doesn't show very much variety or imagination, does it ...? ... but much of the rest of today (unless you count a cold walk in not very picturesque grey light) consisted of my chaining myself to syllabus writing, and that doesn't make for anything especially inspiring by way of visual accompaniment.  I thought I had a perfectly formed, new syllabus for my undergraduate course (on British art 1780-1914, or thereabouts)that just needed a small amount of tweaking - but since it meets on Monday/Wednesday, and there are two Mondays out - because of MLK Day and Presidents Day - my carefully sculptured plans now have developed some very ragged edges (that is not to be read as a complaint against fewer teaching days ...).  So it's been a day of compression and scissors and paste ...