Art Shanties on Ice

The “Art Shanty Project” is a collection of ice houses created with art in mind.  My friend Meredith sent me this story from Minnesota Public Radio.

Jonas Lindberg’s ice shack has a white roof, pale blue transparent plastic walls, and simple wooden benches. The frozen lake serves as the floor – he’s swept it clean so that you can peer down through the black ice several feet, watching cracks zigzag downward into darkness. He’s got a hole drilled for fishing, and he plans to send a camera down with some light to shoot an underwater video.

Lindberg was one of several artists who responded to a call by the Soap Factory gallery in Minneapolis to come up with their own unique designs for ice houses.

A few yards away, Mike Hoyt is creating an ice painting. He paints figures onto sheets of translucent plastic, secures them in a box frame and covers them in lake water until they’ve frozen into large ice panels. Then he stands them up and the sunlight plays with the colors.

“Mostly I’ve been working with just a series of people that have caught fish. Sort of like trophy fish, but removing the image of the fish and adding something else, another found object or image,” says Hoyt. “I’m sort of playing with the idea of the magic and mystery of what you might pull out of the lake.”

Photographer Xavier Tavera explores negative space with his sculptural interpretation of an ice shack. Rather than a house with walls, he has erected a number of ladders indicating where walls might have been.  Visitors to the Art Shanty Project feel compelled to climb the ladders embedded in ice and check out the view.

I’m not sure what was so compelling about this story to me.  Maybe the possiblity of art happening anywhere?  To read the full story by Marianne Combs, click here.