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The series Polarized Heads depicts the likes of Jon Stewart, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, and Al Sharpton encased by ice in abstracted seascapes. These figures all have careers that bridge entertainment and politics. The ice imagery depicts these characters as fixed in prescribed roles. I navigate an imaginary polar terrain for images at once abstract and figurative, political and absurd.
Unlike other news items, the story of melting ice caps quite literally moves at its own pace, dictating its own timeline. As something that will affect the lives of future generations, this is an event that resists the 24-hour news cycle. Despite this, it is through mass media outlets that we develop this conversation. The grand scale and unprecedented effects of climate change upend a market driven philosophy that governs the production of news and its commentary. It matches the rhetoric of brinksmanship so often encountered in current news sources with events proportional to that language.
The climate change story has the potential to deepen our rapid-fire political discourse, and in turn allow it to better serve its consumers. How this change can happen is still veiled, paused in a “so-close-but-yet-so-far” predicament. The unmoving ice shelf is an autological metaphor for the understanding of its own condition. Like the largest recorded calving of an ice shelf portrayed in the recent film, Chasing Ice - nothing moves, until everything does.
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