Icons of Change
Making Sense - exhibition installation view at Craft 2011. Artists Jasmine Morgan Ryan and Debbie Symons
Icons of Climate Change
Making Sense Catalogue Essay, Craft 2011.
by Assosiate Professor Linda Williams, RMIT University.
There are several well-known types of imagery recurring in the public arena that are now icons of climate change, and photos or film of massive slabs of melting ice in the polar regions have become one of these key indices of escalating global environmental change.
In this exhibition, the Australian artists Debbie Symons and Jasmine Targett focus on Antarctica in ways that extend and reconfigure these iconic images, taking them into the imaginative realm of art. Their works invite us to consider the Antarctic region from two different perspectives: from the position of endangered species on the ground, and from the aerial perspective of the hole in the ozone layer.
Interpreted through the affective language of art, Symons and Targett’s thoughts on Antarctica invite the viewer to reflect on the immanent threats to the region itself, and further, to the ways in which the deterioration of Antarctica is now represented as a key to environmental and ecological deterioration on a global scale.
Linda Williams
September 2011
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