Yauger Williams, assistant professor of visualization at Texas A&M, celebrates the life-giving power of water in “The Last Snowperson,” a series of images recently exhibited at a juried art show in San Francisco.
The images, made of collages of Greenland’s Ilulissat glacier, contain glacieresque snowpeople in various elemental states or planetary-like situations.
“This work is part of an ongoing series, ‘Ice on Parade,’ aspiring to feature the sublimity of water for creating increasing presence with judgment and our environment,” said Williams.
“The Last Snowperson” was shown Sept. 17 at New Art ’08 an exhibit held at Hotel Des Arts in San Francisco, a unique venue showcasing art exhibits as well as hotel rooms with walls painted by artists given full artistic control.
“The result,” says the hotel’s website, is “not simply art as a decoration, but art as an interactive experience.”
For the New Art ’08 show, all five floors of the hotel were filled with the work of emerging artists.
In his ‘Ice on Parade’ project, Williams seeks to personify the Earth’s environment with Ice People sculptures in Antarctica and the U.S. He plans to use the Internet extensively, documenting the project through video and photos.
“The website will serve as a hub to alert the public about ‘Ice on Parade’ in Antarctica and the United States, sharing links to other sites about Antarctica and the environment,” he said.
The project will be assembled as a traveling show for exhibits at art galleries, architectural conferences, universities and high schools.
The “Ice on Parade” website can be accessed at http://www.iceonparade.com/about.htm.
Williams’ areas of research interest include intellectualizing basic visual images as fine art and democratizing fine art for learning and understanding humanity. He has been invited to speak about integrating art and science at architectural conferences in El Salvador, Brazil and Kuwait, and has exhibited his drawings, photographs and mixed-media sculptures in New York, Los Angeles and Berkeley.
