“ICE” by San Francisco artist Brian Goggin is an ambitious project to remove a monolithic block of ice from the Greenland ice sheet and bring it back to New York City, where it will be preserved in a temperature-controlled sculpture for 488 years. The project is meant to highlight the effects of global warming, and in keeping with the theme, as much as possible of the removal and hauling of the ice block will be done by hand.
When things are common they often go unnoticed, fading into the background, but
when they are rare and impossible to replicate, they stand in relief and become
precious to us. Envision walking though a threshold and entering a large, cold,
dimly lit room. At the center stands a massive monolith of dense blue ice.
Glowing, the ice stands within the glass of a giant sculptural reliquary
surrounded by a protective ring of laser beams casting subtle blue and green
lines. ICE will surgically extract and securely transport a monolith
of ancient ice from the great ice sheet of Greenland to fine art museums in
major cities. In its place will remain a large rectangular cavity cut into the
glacier, its sides meticulously hewn and polished to expose a sapphire blue
monolith in negative.
Goggin is the artist behind “Defenestration,” the beloved site-specific installation in a San Francisco tenement.
via SF Weekly
images via Brian Goggin
