'Look What Happens When A Video Artist's Virtual Snow Meets Our Winter Of 2015'

WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, showcased Boston artist Georgie Friedman’s “Under the Icy Sky” exhibition, a video projection on the walls of the Integrated Science Complex at the College of Holy Cross. Friedman’s videos speak of the force and grandeur nature—rushing water, geysers, lightning, crashing waves, clouds in the upper atmosphere recorded from a high-altitude balloon. The exhibition will be on display through Feb. 27.

The footage includes lumbering icebergs Friedman recorded in Iceland in 2008 and falling snow she saw out the window of her Jamaica Plain apartment during storms in the winter of 2012 to 2013, progressing from a light snow to a blizzard with lightning, which is actually digitally added electrical streams and sparks from a Van de Graaff generator and Tesla coils, reports WBUR.

“I wanted the snow and the wind patterns to be seen without any contextual information,” Friedman writes of her video projection ‘The Building Storm.’ It is not about the snow falling in my neighborhood, it is about the invisible forces of wind and the unexpected movements of the snow,” she said.

What Friedman didn’t anticipate when creating this project was the amount of snow that would fall on New England this past winter. “One nice, unexpected surprise is how the snow has factored into the installations, especially for ‘Shifting Ice.’ Now, the ice doesn’t only move along the wall, but it moves along the 2 to 3 feet of snow. There are many great moments when the water or ice imagery merges perfectly with the snow; either just in the way it moves across it or, for example, there is an instance when an ice chunk pops up from under the water, and now it is popping up from the snow.”

“Overall, I want viewers, especially people on the campus who frequent this area every day, to gain a new perspective of a familiar space, a new awareness of their everyday surroundings—and, ideally, to contemplate their relationships to the natural, built and technology-created environments,” adds Friedman.

To read the full article click here.

This “Holy Cross in the News” item by Jacqueline Smith ’15.