Traveling show stops in Santa Monica
Right now, it may look like a parking lot filled with shipping containers but within weeks, it will become the next Nomadic Museum with life-sized elephants and other wildlife living among art patrons.
“I like to say that it is a big Lego in a sandbox by the sea,” said artist Gregory Colbert, who is bringing his traveling exhibit “Ashes and Snow” to Santa Monica.
Thousands of people are behind the making of museum, which is taking shape in the beach parking lot just north of the Santa Monica Pier and opens to the public on Jan. 14. Just feet from the Pacific Ocean, workmen are navigating forklifts, drilling into the ground and arranging shipping containers for the exhibit that will be on display until May. 14.
A temporary museum of 152 shipping containers will house more than 100 large-scale photographic works and an accompanying 35 millimeter film by Colbert that will be aired in a theater within the structure that can seat up to 800 people. The show transforms an area adjacent to Santa Monica’s historic pier into a timeless realm in which wild animals co-exist with humans.
“There is something whimsical and magical about the location,” Colbert said. “It’s by the sea, it’s meditative, beautiful.”
The steel cargo containers are stacked and secured in a checkerboard pattern to create rigid walls. The structure of the roof trusses is partially constructed of paper tubes that rest on 2-foot paper tube columns.
The Santa Monica opening marks the third incarnation of “Ashes and Snow,” Colbert’s 14-year-long personal and artistic odyssey. To date, the artist has completed more than 30 extensive international expeditions to places as diverse as India, Egypt, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Ethiopia, Namibia, Tonga, the Azores, Antarctica and Borneo.
Colbert, who calls animals “nature’s living masterpieces,” captures moments of contact between man and animal. It is the interaction of distant lands, peoples and creatures that emerges, like vivid memories of a shared experience. None of the images have been digitally collaged or superimposed. They record what Colbert saw through the lens of his camera. The artworks, each approximately 5 feet by 8 feet, are mounted without explanatory text so as to encourage an open-ended interaction with the images.
The title “Ashes and Snow” suggests beauty and renewal, while also referring to the literary component of the exhibition — a fictional account of a man who, over the course of a yearlong journey, composes 365 letters to his wife. The source of the title is revealed in the 365th letter. Colbert’s photographs and one-hour film loosely reference the traveler’s encounters and experiences described in the letters.
Colbert’s one-hour 35 millimeter film, edited by two-time Academy Award-winner Pietro Scalia and narrated by actor Laurence Fishburne, is continuously projected on a large-format screen in a column-free theater under a tensile roof supported by bracket beams.
The exhibit — which made its debut in Venice, Italy in 2002 — just wrapped up in New York, where were people lining up for five blocks to get a glance of the museum.
“The people who saw this show in New York will see something very different in Los Angeles; there are 14 new species and two films,” Colbert said. “We could go on to other cities for 10 years and we want it to be a special experience at each place.”
From March through June, more than 300,000 visitors attended the second incarnation of the exhibition at New York’s famed Pier 54 on the Hudson River. Additional venues are planned for the United States, South America, Europe and Asia.
But no where may it be more appropriate than in Los Angeles, a city filled with traffic congestion and a population of people who live so segregated from one another, Colbert said.
“This is a place to feel the collective together,” he said. “A city like Los Angeles, it doesn’t have a place for people to congregate and this space feels democratic.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 26, 2005. Read the original PDF.