We are delighted to launch our exhibition programming with installations of work by Zaria Forman and Peggy Weil.
Zaria Forman
Zaria Forman’s intensely intimate work conveys the urgency of climate change by connecting people to the beauty of remote landscapes. In her drawings, we see at once an almost clinical degree of expository detail and the immediate, warm power of human touch. She has been featured in Banksy’s Dismaland (August to September 2015), and solo exhibitions at Winston Wächter Fine Art in New York City and Seattle. Forman has been honored by a residency aboard the National Geographic Explorer in Antarctica, and has flown over the polar regions with NASA’s Operation IceBridge. She has also collaborated with Harvard University’s Center for the Environment, where her drawings were exhibited for the 2016-2017 academic year.
Forman’s works have appeared in The New York Times’s T Magazine, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The Huffington Post, and have appeared in a range of other media outlets as well. Forman delivered a TED Talk that aired on PBS.
Whale Bay, Antarctica, No. 4, 84x144, 2016 depicts calved glacial ice that has been grounded in the shallow water of Whale Bay in Western Antarctica. Shallow bays such as this are called “iceberg graveyards,” with wind and water sculpting the grounded icebergs into unimaginable shapes as they slowly melt away, sometimes over years.
Forman’s hope is to create momentum and unity of purpose across boundaries of discipline, geography, and political affiliation, a hope she sees as closely aligned with the Climate Museum’s vision of a center for climate education and leadership, and for civic engagement with the challenge of our time.
The Climate Museum's window installation included a reproduction of Whale Bay, Antarctica, No. 4, 84x144, 2016 and a time-lapse video depicting the process of making the work. The original work is in private collection, and the reproduction was displayed courtesy of Winston Wächter Fine Art, Seattle WA.
Peggy Weil
Peggy Weil’s work as an artist and designer spans genres including digital urban signboards, VR, apps, and games. As an original member of the MIT Media Lab, she worked on pioneering interactive projects and has gone on to create award-winning titles including Immersive Journalism projects such as Gone Gitmo, a virtual installation of Guantánamo Prison and Wall Jumpers, a global visualization of political barriers. Weil founded HeadsUP!, a global competition challenging designers to create data visualization of urgent global issues for the public square. Weil’s work has been exhibited and presented at academic, industry, and art venues internationally, including LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, Gijón, Spain; Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow; and CURRENT:LA Public Art Biennial, Los Angeles.
Weil teaches regularly in art, film, and media programs including those at the University of Southern California, UCLA, and California College of the Arts. She also serves as an advisor to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Technology Lab. She is honored to be working with the Climate Museum in its mission to provide a forum for discussion and action on climate change.
88 Cores, shown for the first time as part of this exhibition, is a film that descends two miles through the Greenland Ice Sheet in one continuous pan going back more than 110,000 years in time. This work is the fourth in a series of underlandscapes by Weil, projects treating solid ground as a canvas of critical processes and phenomena: HeadsUP2012, a data visualization of global groundwater from satellite data; UnderLA, an animated underground landscape of the Los Angeles Aquifer beneath the LA River; and Oscar-Zero, a virtual installation of a nuclear launch control center in North Dakota.