The iceberg sculpture, A Fragile Absolute 1.1 (Cervino/SF0518A), 2023, was robotically carved, and hand-finished in reclaimed statuary Carrara marble. Reynolds views the image-capturing techniques (drone-based structure-for-motion composite imaging and sub-surface multi-beam sonar) as directly connected to a continuum of the use of optical devices. From the camera obscura forward: all were created to bring high-resolution optics to the realm of the hand and render space beyond the visual capacities of the human. And on the most immediate visual level, the crystalline, carved statuary marble bears an uncanny resemblance to glacial ice seen at a distance. While the marble was formed from the geological compression of sea creatures 250 million years ago, and the ice sheet from which its referent calved was formed by layers of snow that accumulated over a million years, the iceberg on which the sculpture is based disappeared in only three years, (and more Ice has melted in the past twenty years than the previous 200). [iii] That we may see the world from an iceberg’s perspective, Reynolds’ sculpture offers a play of time and physical scale in the present: while we see the iceberg in its complete form, it has since melted and is now seawater.

The iceberg paintings, Circulation 0-270 (Cervino/SF0518A) are based on six still images of the iceberg created by circling the rendering in a 3D animation program. Different from every angle and constantly in flux, while each appears to be radically different – these paintings offer six distinct views of the same iceberg. In a paradoxical u-turn, the smooth painting surface becomes messy. Reynolds engages in a range of painting techniques- from wet-into-wet brush application native to a landscape painting lexicon to scraping the paint film and even using his fingerprints to create and describe the form. Perhaps even point to self-implication. The paintings are also informed by his recent trip to the Arctic, where he studied and filmed massive icebergs during what turned out to be the hottest period in recorded human history. While the work might reference or invoke the romanticist works of Frederic Edwin Church or William Bradford and the procession of technological optical devices employed in the history of landscape painting, the multi-perspective, above and below of production, extends the gaze into new territory.

Of the New Suns, 2022; Reynolds said: “the suns are in many ways the simplest paintings I make: on the most basic level, every being has their own relationship to it, and on the other – they are just circles in rectangles.” The title New Suns refers to Octavia Butler, who wrote: There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.[iv]

In Reynolds's work, the distinctions that animate much of contemporary art debate between analog and digital, art and science, traditional, and technological image-making collapse. Always changing, melting rapidly, and widely circulating in the public imagination as an embodiment of human-caused climate change, Reynolds suggests that icebergs might be the ultimate “Readymade” for the 21st century.

Through their serial logic, the economy of means, and conceptual organization in dialog with Minimalism, the paintings and sculptures privilege the agency and perception of the viewer’s experience. The same distance from the address, 960 Madison Avenue as Salt Lake City, the Arctic is not some far-off, remote abyss, irrespective of geopolitical boundaries, our every move is deeply connected to its fate. For the scientists – the iceberg point-cloud data and technical iceberg imagery serve as a tool for discovery – Reynolds views it as an artifact of their multilayered process of generating knowledge and a pathway to enlightenment and possibility. The artwork in this exhibition might ultimately point to the beauty and fragility of our planet.

The artist will donate a percentage of his profits to support the Juneau Icefield Research Program. (link)

[i] Earth scientists Dave Sutherland Ph.D. and Kristin Schild Ph.D.: their work:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2020GL089765

[ii] Christopher Heuer, Into the White, The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image, ZONE, 2019

[iii] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/ice-sheets/

[iv] Octavia E. Butler, in Parable of the Trickster, 1989