Coming Home to the Ice Age

The Future is a Field of Rocks, 2022, c-print, glass, steel artist’s frame

The Future is a Field of Rocks, 2022, c-print, glass, steel artist’s frame

Coming Home to the Ice Age, 2022, c-print, steel artist’s frame

Coming Home to the Ice Age, 2022, c-print, steel artist’s frame

Coming Home to the Ice Age, installation shot

Avalanche Transect Timeline, 2022, c-prints, magnets, found fencing

Avalanche Transect Timeline, 2022, c-prints, magnets, found fencing

Beneath Avalanche Glacier, 2022, c-print, steel artist’s frame

Double Diary, 2022, orb, glass, c-print, The Snow Leopard

Double Diary, 2022, orb, glass, c-print, The Snow Leopard

Coming Home to the Ice Age, installation shot

May 25 - August 4, 2022 (Terrain Terror), c-prints, found fencing, magnets

Coming Home to the Ice Age, installation shot

The Pace of a Woman, Boulder and Slug, 2022, UV prints on aluminum, glass, lead-free solder, brass rod, found equipment

The Pace of a Woman, Boulder and Slug, 2022, detail shot

Coming Home to the Ice Age
Suzanna Zak
May 13 - June 24, 2022

Crossing paths, a vague description of the trailhead: “after the bend, 30 seconds or so, it’ll be on the left...” Mist hugged the mountain. At the top, the wind pushed and pulled it. A harbor appeared, a small island. A road, a house, then grey again, all over.

I once heard that a window screen lets only half the sunshine through. Colored glass does something too - a picture pushed away, then pulled into view. You left to find lonely boulders, older than who knows. A glacier recedes slowly, but sure as hell, won’t freeze over.

On the other side of the Avalanche, around the clock’s corner, are flowers with elastic knowledge. One that expands and contracts, as lungs do, over hours, centuries, otherwise. On this side, the other one, are stories told without words. Told through wind, through winters, through winding paths. Stories of toothy beings, among others that have since faded into a geography of absence.

To walk this side is to have a talk with time; is to enter a conversation where you are forced to listen up and down; is to accept the rise and fall of your lungs as a miracle with limits - with strings attached to the tents we pitch in the clouds.

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Coming Home to the Ice Age features a new body of sculpture and photography by Suzanna Zak inspired by her participation in a July 2021 research excursion studying the effects of climate change in the Selkirk Range, British Columbia. Initiated by researcher Astra Lincoln for the University of Victoria’s Mountain Legacy Project, the trip’s purpose was twofold—to document the recession of the Avalanche glacier, and gain insight into how post-glacial ecologies are shaped by this kind of geomorphological activity. These works extend from Suzanna’s scientific ‘transect’ and personal photographs taken on and around the Avalanche’s glacial forefield—that is, the new terrain exposed after glacial melt, unearthing the uncanny potential for a ‘new’ ecosystem in the wake of a glacier that had persisted for millenia. A combination of empirical evidence and intimate moments in the mountains, these images offer us a partial access to this geological wonder and the timescale it represents.

We crossed paths with Suzanna on Salt Spring Island one week before her departure.

~ Garrett Lockhart & Danica Pinteric

Suzanna Zak is a Ukrainian-Russian-American artist working in New York across the mediums of sculpture, photography, and installation, with an environmental concern. She received her MFA from Yale School of Art in sculpture in 2019 and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in photography in 2012. In 2019, she was awarded the Yale Prison Education Initiative Teaching Fellowship, where she taught, ‘Visual Thinking,” a studio and art theory course, at MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institution. Most recently, she served as research assistant for the Mountain Legacy Project, where she worked alongside scientists & conservationists as the lead photographer to collect climate change data in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Flesh of Earth,” was held at Prairie Gallery in Chicago, and a two person show, “Our Companion, Our Other,” at Vitrine Gallery in Basel, Switzerland. She is also an avid rock climber and lifelong mushroom forager

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022

Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022

Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace Center of the UniverseAugust 5 - September 18, 2022 Amanda HorowitzBad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyoteperformed by Sophia Cleary and Ada FriedmanJuly 14 & July 15, 2022

Suzanna ZakComing Home to the Ice Ageopening May 13 - June 24, 2022

Sylvie Hayes-Wallace
Center of the Universe
August 5 - September 18, 2022

Amanda Horowitz
Bad Water, True West or Between Myself the Crickets and the Coyote
performed by Sophia Cleary and Ada Friedman
July 14 & July 15, 2022

Suzanna Zak
Coming Home to the Ice Age
opening May 13 - June 24, 2022