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. On view during a record-breaking the New York summer, Blizzard embraces a deliberate seasonal dissonance.
Blizzard opens on the heels of Robert Dimin's trip 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 in its present state as a calving and active glacier. Nearly every conversation about the natural world of Greenland is cautionary. Its waves of indigenous migration ending in lost civilizations until the last 500 years. The remnants of European colonialism in situ to remind us of those expeditions that had been marked by death. Even the Vikings only stayed briefly either dying out or returning home due the difficultly of endless darkness or perpetual sunlight.
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 notable 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.
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. 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.
Lastly the work of Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen including the video piece titled “Why We Fight”. This video and the accompanying archival digital print take the form of wartime propaganda to recruit a generation of soldiers for Greenland to protect itself by taking over the world. The body of work was first created in the early 2000’s to discuss Greenland’s relationship with Denmark and the EU, but was eerily prophetic as it is more relevant than ever twenty years later.
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, sculpture, and video, these artists treat snow, ice, and frozen landscapes not as backdrops, but as sites of memory, sublimity, and protest.
Blizzard will take place in DIMIN's main gallery concurrently to The Swan's Script III in the Living Room. DIMIN is located in Tribeca at 406 Broadway, Fl. 2, New York, NY. For all inquiries, please contact gallery@dimin.nyc.
