An Antarctic odyssey, by way of Fairfield

Fairfield University Art Museum will be presenting “Helen Glazer: Walking in Antarctica” at its Bellarmine Hall Galleries from Feb. 2 through March 16.

Glazer traveled to Antarctica in 2015 as a grantee of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program to photograph ice and geological formations for eventual production as photographic prints and sculpture. She worked out of remote Antarctic scientific field camps and had access to protected areas that can only be entered with government permits or in the company of a skilled mountaineer.

“Walking in Antarctica” is being described as an “an immersive, interdisciplinary exhibition bringing together photography, sculpture, and audio narrative to take the viewer on a journey through an extraordinary environment of remote places that the tourist ships do not reach and few people get to witness in person. The exhibition is organized as a series of ‘walks’ through remarkable Antarctic landscapes: over frozen lakes, around towering glaciers, and baroque sea ice formations, into a magnificent frozen ice cave, across fields of surreal-looking boulders, and through a lively colony of nesting Adélie penguins.”

Visitors to the exhibition who have smartphones, and visitors to the exhibition website will be able to access an audio tour narrated by Glazer, drawn from a blog in which she recorded her experiences.

This project is organized by Mid-America Arts Alliance and is an adaptation of the artist’s solo exhibition of the same title held at the Rosenberg Gallery at Goucher College in Baltimore.

Photo: Helen Glazer’s “Cloudburst, Erebus Ice Tongue Cave, Antarctica, 2015/2017”; courtesy of the artist