AN ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND A GLACIER WITHOUT EVER HAVING SEEN ONE

A programmatic thread of 20 individual works & projects related to ice, granite, & clay, archived at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

STATEMENT

I work to understand glaciers in their absence, through the traces they have left in the Great Lakes region where I live. I don’t have much of a choice but to imagine them. There is a reverence of the unseen and I try to understand it in ways that end up feeling like ritual. Replicating glacial behaviors, mimicking glacial processes, mapping the glacial movement of stones and clay, recreating glacial functions at human scale, playing with the possibilities at a landscape scale, and bridging across time to connect ice ages from the deep past with ice ages of the deep future. The work I produce and the tools I build prime actual landscapes for collaborative activation in the deep future when my objects will yield to the geologic force of the next glacier in the next ice age.

ARCTIC & REGIONAL PROJECTS

LOGBOOK

CATALOG OF WORKS

  • REGISTERED WORKS

    Select object-based work from my complete catalog investigating the connections between people, places, land use, & deep time.

  • COMMEMORATIVE WORKS

    Multiples, artist books, & select original works produced during my field practice to tell the stories I observe while conducting fieldwork.

BIO

RYAN DEWEY works in sculpture, research, and land art, looking at connections between people, places, and land use to produce a kind of ecological dreaming. Donna Haraway has called his work one of her favorite examples of art about the anthropocene in her book Staying With The Trouble. His archive is housed at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. He has lived on several islands, in several jungles, in one desert, on one mountain, and on two of the five Great Lakes. He is a member of the American Society of Polar Philatelists and has received residencies at ACRE (Chicago), the Alps Art Academy (Switzerland), and the Montello Foundation (Nevada), as well as serving two appointments as visiting researcher in cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University where he wrote the open-access book Hack the Experience: New Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science (Punctum Books, 2018).