Environmental Exhibit on Display at the Erie Art Museum

Erie, PA, October 27, 2011 --(PR.com)-- The Erie Art Museum will exhibit DoubleExposure and Politics of Snow, a show that provides a glimpse into the world of climate change through three different artists’ images of glaciers. The exhibit combines photographs from the traveling exhibit DoubleExposure: Photographing Climate Change with dramatic, large scale oil paintings of glaciers from Diane Burko’s “Politics of Snow” series.

The subject is timely and important; glaciers are disappearing from the earth at an alarming rate. The images “show dramatic evidence of the disappearance of large areas and masses of glaciers,” according to Bruce Molnia, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who specializes in climate change in Alaska.

Providing a dynamic visual representation of the effects of climate change and global warming, DoubleExposure includes pairs of black and white glacier photographs taken fifty years or more apart. Brad Washburn (1910-2007), a photographer, alpinist, cartographer, adventurer and president of Boston’s Museum of Science for nearly five decades, took the original photographs in the early- to mid-1900s. They are presented side-by-side with modern photographs, taken between 2005 and 2007 by David Arnold, a freelance photographer and journalist, who served as a staff reporter for the Boston Globe for 25 years. The exhibit also features a video of the last recorded interview with Washburn before his death in 2007.

In DoubleExposure, descriptive text panels accompany each pair of photographs, telling the story of climate change. The exhibit has traveled the country since spring of 2008, visiting science centers, natural history museums and similar institutions. The dramatic images make a great impact. “The pairing of the stunning photographs of Washburn and Arnold, with lucid explanatory panels on climate change, will allow exhibit viewers to both see and understand how dramatically Earth’s climate is changing,” states James J. McCarthy, President, American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Also on display are oil paintings from Bucks County painter Diane Burko’s “Politics of Snow” series. Interested in the ideas of climate change and glacial decline, Burko’s works document change in natural icons, such as the Matterhorn and shrinking glaciers in America and Iceland. For over 40 years, her work has focused on monumental and geological phenomena throughout the world. She investigates actual locations on the ground and from open-door helicopters and Cessnas, taking photographs and sketching. Her ongoing series “Politics of Snow” presents diptychs of historical visual comparisons in very large scale. She takes her own photographs for reference and uses historical photos to contrast.

Diane Burko holds a Bachelor of Science in Art History and Painting from Skidmore College and Master of Fine Arts from the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where she continues to live and work today. She exhibits regionally, nationally and internationally as a painter and photographer.

The stunning images of DoubleExposure and Politics of Snow encourage visitors to think about climate change and its effects on the world around them. They force visitors to consider the long-term effects of global warming on life and the earth by allowing them to see these changes over the last century.

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