By Kit Freeman
The Dallas Museum of Art will present the inaugural solo museum exhibition of French-Swiss artist Julian Charrière, Concentrations 63: Julian Charrière, Towards No Earthly Pole on May 2, 2021. A part of the exhibition series Concentrations, which features emerging artists, Charrière’swork will be on display for the 40th anniversary of the exhibition series.
Charrière’s work examines the result of human life on natural landscapes, specifically at extreme climates. Exploring the remote locations around the world, the artist brings together sculpture and image to depict an irreversible change. Also on the walls of Concentrations 63 are photos of ice caps and glaciers, overwhelming in size as the figures are swallowed with shadows and blinding whiteness of the ice.
Contrasting geological timescales and post-romantic ideals of nature, Charrière utilizes performance, sculpture, and mixed media to project views on environmental science and cultural history. His work encapsulates the viewer’s fearful yet questioning understanding of the world, and reflects on the quest to understand it.
Magnificent in nature, the settlements the artist portrays are rugged, dark, and jetted. The artist’s technical handling forces his sculptures to look almost ice-like, and cold to the touch. Casted and drilled with holes, the sensitivity of the sculpture represents how the world is shifting due to human interaction. Monumental in size, the photographs juxtapose the tundra environment of his sculptures, picturing loneliness. Alongside the icy space is a projector, featuring a monument emblazoned with cultural history and on fire. The flames move wildly, reminding the viewer the mobility of the planet, and how the environment can shift at ease at the cost of humanity.
Not All Who Wander are Lost is the first work of the exhibition Concentrations 63. The core-drilled sculpture is a stone glacial rock, welcoming the viewer with the world’s landscapes and fixtures. Charrière, through his work, recounts his time in the polar region, sampling and researching the ways in which ice, rock, and water form.
Encased in a refrigerated case are delicate yet frozen in time plant structures, frozen to the core. Tropisme acts as a time capsule, forever suspended, and never decaying. The leaved sculptures are hidden by shields of ice, and forces the viewer to walk around and through the exhibition to witness Charrière’s deliberate decisions.
The exhibition explores the melancholic like state of nature in the human era, grappling with the environment and imagination. As the viewer enters the exhibition, they are greeted with a dark room and a fantastic moving movie of a glacier rock, invoking a sublime feeling of the artic, imagination, and visual contemplation. Towards No Earthly Pole is a 2019 film running 104 minutes. A defining image of the Anthropocene, the current geological age, and polar snow caps, the moving picture captures the mystery and power of the effects of global warming and climate change. Charrière documents drone footage of the Alps, Iceland, and Greenland to comprise his film. The film, larger than the viewer, emphasizes the scope and majestic beauty of the unforeseen nature of the glacial caps. Charrière says in the exhibition text, the work “demonstrates a shift in the mode of representation by depicting a place that has been overly exposed in another light.”
“Julian’s work points to the rapid acceleration of the timeline of such natural phenomenon,” curator Dr. Katherine Brodbeck says. The Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art remarks how Charrière’s sculptures represent the “erratic” nature of the unusual occurrences of the natural world. Since beginning her time at the DMA, Brodbeck has headed major exhibitions and programs, including the survey exhibition Jonas Woord (2019) and many focus exhibitions.
In reflecting on the exhibition, Brodbeck states, “Charrière’s work is a powerful visual reminder of what we know and what we don’t know about our relationship to the earth.”