Team 14: Hal Gage / Bruce Farnsworth

NATURE OUT OF CONTEXT

In an attempt to put the public in closer contact with natural and share the ephemeral beauty of ice this project will take naturally formed ice flows out of their natural context and place them on display in a urban setting.

Ice flows will be extracted from Cook Inlet, trucked to downtown Anchorage’s Park Strip and mounted for close-up inspection. The ice flows will remain on display as they melt and sublimate leaving only a residue of inlet silt.

Nature Out of Context is supported by the Port Authority of Anchorage.

Hal Gage

Hal Gage was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska. He started as a painter, but in college he was introduced to photography. Since that time he has exhibited his photography in Alaska, the Lower Forty Eight, England, Russia, and Europe. Although his work covers a wide range of subject matter, he is best known for his natural landscape photography, especially his decade long series on ice. Over his 30 year career Gage has received numerous awards and accolades including several grants from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and in 2004 a Rasmuson Foundation Artist Fellowship.

Bruce Farnsworth

Bruce Farnsworth, an Anchorage writer and community organizer, conceived the installation Out of Context as a contribution to the Freeze Project and an experiment in the “Earth Works” genre of contemporary art. He then took the idea to Hal Gage, the visual artist with the deepest artistic affinity for this subject that he knew, and thus a three way collaboration was born (Farnsworth, Gage, and Mother Nature).

“Part of the appeal of this project was to find out if it could even be done. Nature seems to do her part so easily but the humans involved will struggle and possibly even fail to do theirs,” Farnsworth says about the Port of Anchorage’s crucial participation.