Martin Cox is a visual poet. He engages heart, mind, and soul with his photographic art; beautiful images that once seen, remain etched like a memory in the mind of the viewer.
His exhibition Snow Drawings, closing at Fabrik Gallery on La Cienega this Wednesday, is a gorgeous series, an enchanted selection of Icelandic landscapes that both depicts a very specific place and transcends both space and time. A dichotomy? A graceful one.
Cox discussed his work Saturday, describing the heart and soul of his minimal archival pigment print photographs, which depict a recent trip to northeast Iceland. Each image reveals the vastness, the beauty, and the fragility of what the artist terms the “vulnerability of the arctic natural world.” His work seeks not only to reveal the intricate beauty and indelible images of the region but to bring viewers’ attention to the rapid climate change in the region. He is fearful that the greatness of this environment may be lost forever.
Images are spare, almost as if they were woodblock prints. The wide mountains, the tiny home, the fragile imprint of a tree – this is what Cox wants us to see.
Along with his photographic art, Cox is also working to preserve the area by introducing other artists to its wonder. He’s established and officially opened GilsfjordurArts, a residency program in a wonderfully isolated part of Iceland in which he is establishing 3-week residencies starting August 26th.
He describes the landscape and his experience in it while working the create the residency space. “I went for a walk. Just the sound of wagtails warning me I may be straying near their nests, and the fast flowing river and falls nearly, and this odd realization that no one was observing me. Despite the vastness of the landscape it was completely devoid of humans, just the sheep giving me a once over.”
That Cox loves this land, this landscape, this earth is evident in all of his work. Snow Drawings offers a shimmering vision of the icy beauty, and the threat posed to it by global warming.
In his exhibition talk last Saturday, Cox revealed “Wild blue berries are vanishing due to lack of snow. The grass is being over taken by moss, also due to reduced snow. Winter rain never used to happen, now it rains in winter. Autumn is changing more than Spring – it is getting warmer and longer.”
The works themselves are riven with light, with frozen beauty. We think of the cold climate, the ice, and the snow as something temporary. It vanishes with Spring. We may even love that temporary quality. But as Cox’s glowing, moving visual poetry shows all too clearly, that transitional quality to the cold is only welcome when the transition to Spring is natural, not when it is a permanent state of transition, erasing the very existence of cold itself.
The artist exhibits – in the spare, sparkling quality of his work – visual haiku as it were, deep passion for this landscape and its images, and deep understanding and kindness for its fragility, and in fact, the fragility of the earth itself, and man’s existence upon it. His tiny houses, his small farms, set against a backdrop of such amazing vastness that it is even more shocking the effect man has had on the seemingly endless scope of nature.
The other poetry structure his artwork evokes is an epic saga – each fleeting poetic vista is part of a greater, vast whole, representing all of humanity.
There is a glimpse, in Cox’s lustrous landscapes, of a grand beauty, a great possibility – hanging from a thread. It could all, literally and figuratively, melt away.
Above, Cox’s photography by day and by night.
In the meantime, Cox will show it to us, in spare and insightful works that make the fingers tingle with the cold; he will show it to us with his residency project, introducing his love for the land in physical proximity to it.
Cox says “It was my mind that placing artists in the big silence would offer a place to disengage, recharge, engage.” And to connect them to this environment, and show them, gently, show us all, what is at stake. “There is an Icelandic expression þetta reddast, it means ‘it’ll all work out in the end.’ Sometimes things works out, sometimes they don’t, but we don’t stop trying.”
He will photograph the soul of the earth, and reveal it in poetry.
For more information about Cox’ Iceland Artists Residency program, visit www.gilsfjordurarts.com
To catch the closing of Snow Drawings, visit Fabrik Gallery at 2636 La Cienega Blvd. in Culver City.
- Genie Davis; photos courtesy of the artist