Blane De St. Croix How to Move a Landscape

How to Move a Landscape is artist Blane De St. Croix’s largest and most ambitious exhibition to date, exploring the geopolitical landscape and environmental issues. De St. Croix’s research-intensive art involves years of field work and collaboration with leading climate scientists. How to Move a Landscape features drawings and sculpture alongside newly commissioned large-scale installations that incorporate new scientific findings about the Earth’s dissolving permafrost layer.

Over the past decade, De St. Croix has worked with the tradition of landscape art, shifting from the traditional purview of painting in favor of immersive sculptural installations that address topical issues relating to society, politics, and science. His method involves extended periods of research and exploration of places such as the Arctic Circle and the Gobi Desert, including time spent as a research fellow at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. His newest body of work is focused on field research around the earth’s dissolving permafrost, which subsequently creates vast craters in the earth as the result of exploding underground methane in Siberia and Alaska.

As part of the exhibition, De St. Croix created a series of new works commissioned for MASS MoCA’s triple-height gallery, including a three-story high sculpture made to look like a sheet of dissolving ice, a series referencing alchemy, open pit mines and hurricanes, a towering snow-covered arctic landscape, and an installation referencing the dissolving permafrost allows visitors to experience large sculptural craters from dramatic vantage points, both above and beneath the work.

How to Move a Landscape includes a media room to screen De St. Croix’s interviews of scientists on climate issues, and a gallery for related research documentation and science data. The exhibition includes a selection of De St. Croix’s previous work, including works that deal with issues ranging from polar ice to the contested border between the United States and Mexico. Throughout How to Move a Landscape, he reminds us of the precarious nature of the world around us, while using scientific data to document, and question, planetary change.

 

Further Reading
At MASS MoCA, art built for a planet on the edge, The Boston Globe, July 2020

About the Artist
Blane De St. Croix’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally at Fredericks & Freiser, New York, NY; Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; The Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans, LA; The Kathmandu International Triennale, Nepal Arts Council; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, FL: deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA; and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn. He is a 2019 recipient of the Lee Krasner Award, in recognition of a lifetime of artistic achievement, from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and has received The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors, and The Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

You can download a PDF of the exhibition guide here.

Major support for How to Move a Landscape is provided by Scott and Ellen Hand with additional support from the National Endowment for the Arts. Catalog support is provided in part by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Programming at MASS MoCA is made possible in part by the Barr Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, and Mass Cultural Council.

The artist would also like to thank the following for their support of this exhibition: The Brian Wall Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The Efroymson Family Fund, The Puffin Foundation, The Smithsonian Institute (SARF), Dieu Donné, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, and PolyQuest, Inc.

   

Photo: Etienne Frossard