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SNOW JOB

Two really obscure towns in Lapland. Tons of the white stuff. Leading artists and intellectuals.
Will The Snow Show fly?

Text: GERALD HANNON

1 | 2 | 3 | JAN

Poo is so last season. Today, think snow. Think ice.

A few years ago, British artist Chris Ofili caused a sensation (and outraged then-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani) when he incorporated some elephant poo into a portrait of the Virgin Mary. But I ask you: Did poo portraiture catch on? Are there international poo conferences? Have you ever heard of a poo hotel? Might you spend your hard-earned dollars on a visit to a castle made of poo? No, dung is done. Kaput. Finis. Today, think snow. Think ice.

Think high art. Think some of the world’s best known artists (as in Yoko Ono or Anish Kapoor) joined at the hip with architects already famous (as in Tadao Ando) or architectural firms both playful and cerebral (as in Asymptote) to bring us, of all things, a collaborative art event. In March. In Finland. In the outdoors. Held not in sophisticated, art-friendly Helsinki, but in Rovaniemi, a town perched right on the Arctic Circle, and in Kemi, a small port city on the Gulf of Bothnia, which is a solid sheet of ice in winter. You could walk across to Sweden should you want to.

The event? It’s called The Snow Show, opens to the public in March and just might take snow out of the deep freeze, so to speak, of environmental ephemera and cultural contempt. Organized by New York independent curator Lance Fung, in collaboration with Kemi Art Museum director Unto Käyhkö and Rovaniemi Art Museum director Hilkka Liikkanen, The Snow Show bills itself as the first-ever exhibition that "explores the dynamics of visual artists and architects working together on structures made primarily of snow and ice." More than that, if you listen to the enthusiastic Fung, you get the sense that this project is practically becoming a blueprint for world peace.

Whatever – but it’s clearly a, well, cool idea. The scheme has attracted some 13 artist and architect teams (a meltdown from the planned 27 teams) heading to Finland. They may well work miracles with that all-too-familiar Canadian stuff that most of us just curse, shovel or – if we’re ardent ski fans – pray for.

Praying was probably high on the list for the artist/architect participants in a press preview held last February. The weather was atypically warm, and the snow-and-ice construction specialists building two of the works were facing tight deadlines and structural demands not usually encountered in the ice-castle work they do. In Rovaniemi, architect Steven Holl and artist Jene Highstein had designed the largest ice structure ever built in Lapland. Nine metres high, the work, called Oblong Voidspace, consumed some 500 cubic metres of ice and weighed approximately 500 tons. It sat magnificently on the banks of the Ounasjoki River, which courses through the heart of Rovaniemi.

1 | 2 | 3 | JAN