LAST DAY: Kimura Gallery features photographs, paintings by two artists known for global warming concern

Ongoing through today, Feb. 5
Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.

Kimura Gallery, Second Floor Fine Arts Bldg.


Titled "Sublime Transience," this exhibit features photographs by Camille Seaman and paintings and drawings by Richard Carter. Their biographies follow:

Camille Seaman

Camille Seaman was born in 1969 to a Native American (Shinnecock tribe) father and African American mother. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York at Purchase, where she studied photography with Jan Groover and has since taken master workshops with Steve McCurry, Sebastiao Salgado and Paul Fusco.

Her photographs have been published in Newsweek, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men's Journal, Camera Arts, Issues, PDN and American Photo and self-published books on themes such as "My China" and "Melting Away: Polar Images" through Fastback Creative Books, a company that she co-founded. She frequently leads photographic and self-publishing workshops. Her photographs have received many awards including: a National Geographic Award, 2006; and the Critical Mass Top Monograph Award, 2007. In 2008 she was honored with a one-person exhibition, "The Last Iceberg" at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C.

Seaman lives in Berkeley, CA, and takes photographs all over the world using digital and film cameras in multiple formats. She works in a documentary/fine art tradition and since 2003 has concentrated on the fragile environment of the polar regions. Her current project (2008) concerns the beauty of natural environments in Siberia.

Richard Carter

Carter has had a deep-seated fascination with Frederic Edwin Church's painting The Iceberg, as well as the drawings and watercolors of 18th- and 19th-century explorers of the polar regions. He started to introduce icebergs in his work in 2000 with two paintings he created primarily as an exploration of the polar night sky. Through a subsequent series of graphite on watercolor works, Carter found himself using icebergs as a defining foreground element. Since that time, he has created a range of work that reveals the grandeur, magnificent beauty and dramatic sculptural quality of these natural forms.

Ranging in size from the small to the monumental, Carter's pieces reveal the unique character and personality of a particular iceberg. Whether in acrylic or graphite, the work communicates a sense of the sublime in his nocturnal rendering of icebergs. He uses a wide range of visual material for his work such as the National Geographic Society, the US and Canadian Coast Guards, and the International Ice Patrol. In response to growing realities of climate change and global warming, the artist sometimes situates icebergs in his work where they do not appear naturally at this point in time e.g. New York City's East River, and the Santa Monica and San Francisco bays.

After graduating from Villanova University, Carter moved to Aspen, CO, where he worked as an assistant to artist Herbert Bayer, and also pursued his own art practice. He has directed a commercial art gallery, was one of the founding members of the Aspen Art Museum and continues to maintain a career as a production designer for commercials, television and cinema. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and has works in many private and corporate collections. Carter lives and works in Santa Monica, CA and Basalt, CO.

For more information on the show or the gallery, call (907) 786-1783.