Exploring Humanity's Collective Memory - Ashes & Snow
by Ian Chun
posted on 2007-06-20 at 23:06 in Event Review
Sitting on an artificially created island, Odaiba is as much a symbol of
And so it is both ironic and fitting that Gregory Colbert's exhibition finds itself erected at the entrance to this oasis of fantasy. "Ashes and Snow" is an idyll that seeks to evoke a collective memory of humanity's marriage to nature rather than its domination of it. Simultaneously, it creates a bubble that manifests our innocent, perhaps fickle, desires for an older, simpler, more natural state of being.
Stepping into Shigeru Ban's construct for the exhibition, one enters a sepia-toned temple; a solemn, monumental space in which a wooden walkway floating on a sea of crushed granite guides you through a hallway of enormous photographs. Hung between pillars that reach to the sky, the images depict a symbiotic, poetic relationship between humanity and nature that is at once foreign and familiar to most visitors because this is
Despite the focus of the exhibition's publicity on its documentary-like aspects—these are photographs and videos taken on his travels through more than forty countries and regions, images that have no been manipulated by digital technology, images exhibited in a "nomadic museum"—Colbert's images are far from a documentation of human interactions with animals. Rather, the images are sculpted and arranged to suggest through form and tone a vision of cohabitation, an ideal in which humanity does not dominate the earth, but celebrates it together with its other residents.
The experience is religious and fantastic. Gazing upon images of an ideal from the darkness sparks the imagination to dream of adventures to an exotic, foreign world that is purer and more innocent than our own—an
A journey to "Ashes and Snow" is a journey to a world beyond
TAB event details: Gregory Colbert "Ashes and Snow"
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