Ashes and Snow

Ashes and Snow is an ongoing project by Gregory Colbert, who, over the course of fourteen years, has made more than thirty expeditions to India, Egypt, Myanmar, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Namibia, Kenya, Antarctica, India, the Azores, Borneo, and many other locations to photograph unscripted interactions between man and nature’s living masterpieces in their natural state.

The mixed media photographic works shown marry umber and sepia tones in a distinctive encaustic process on handmade Japanese paper. The artworks (each approximately five feet by eight feet) are mounted without explanatory text so as to encourage an open-ended interaction with the images.

Ashes and Snow first opened at the Arsenale in Venice, Italy, in 2002. The show, which consisted of more than one hundred oversized artworks on handmade Japanese paper and a stunning, hour-long 35mm film of Colbert’s interactions with animals, attracted more than 100,000 visitors in three months.
In March 2005, Ashes and Snow opened in New York City on the Hudson River Park’s
Pier 54. Over the next three months, more than 500,000 people attended the exhibition.

This was also the debut of the Nomadic Museum, designed by renowned architect
Shigeru Ban to provide a permanent traveling structure for the show. Constructed primarily out of shipping containers and other recyclable materials, the 56,000-square-foot temporary structure will be reassembled in Santa Monica, California, for its opening on January 14, 2006. The exhibition will travel to other venues in the United States, South America, Asia, and Europe.

The exhibition in Santa Monica was open from January 14, 2006 through May 14,
2006.

Beautiful imagery. Powerful imagery. Take a look