CBCA presents Subject to Change, a solo exhibition of photography by Vicky Stromee. Featuring work from her Blue Ice Series, Stromee explores pattern and texture, light and shadow, movement and transformation through extreme close ups of Antarctic glaciers.

In this series, Stromee engages in a mediative investigation of the different colors, textures, and patterns that emerge from such close examination of arctic glaciers’ icy surfaces. Stromee states that by, “seeking what is eternal amidst the transitory, [she is] drawn to those places where a close-up view of a known object reveals patterns of color, texture and form, allowing [her] to create objects of meditation on that transformative process.” Typically, glaciers are featured amidst a sweeping frozen landscape to emphasize their majesty and imposing scale. Instead, Stromee takes a more intimate approach, bringing the viewer in for a detailed perspective on these larger-than-life geographic features. In doing so, she abstracts the glaciers, paring down her mammoth subjects to their essentials of light, shadow, and texture in that moment. However, Stromee doesn’t completely unmoor her subjects from their context.
 
In identifying these glaciers through each photograph’s title, Stromee encourages a unique familiarity with these extraordinary bodies of ice as well as reflection on their drastic changeability within the broader conversations of global warming and the health of our planet. Stromee subtly asserts an affection for her subjects and encourages the same consideration from her viewers. She reflects that, “Antarctica is one of the harshest climates on earth and yet such beauty abounds. Each image in the series catches a momentary permutation of that transformation and invites the viewer to feel the awe of these evolving forms as in ourselves.” The soft gradient of blues and variety of textures of this singular element from one image to the next coaxes viewers to consider not only on the textures, patterns, and extreme transformations of the glaciers themselves but also within their own lives.
 
 
Tessa Rosenstein
Exhibition Manager
Cynthia Byrnes Contemporary Art
February 2023