The exhibition invites you to use all your senses to imagine and anticipate arriving in winter. Think of the smell of fallen leaves and damp earth as you leave autumn and approach the snow-covered landscape. As climate change reshapes the contours of autumn and winter, pushing their boundaries farther north, winter for many will soon be unreachable, only to exist in art and the stories we keep.
The geographer Tim Cresswell has written that our social constructions—our lives, our experiences, our memories—only exist because of place. If place is the experiential bedrock of our existence, who are we when a place changes before our eyes? Who do we become when a place becomes something else?
What will we do when winter no longer lives in our body’s memory? When winter is warmer, wetter, browner—who are we?
Is it we who invent the stories and thus inform the land, or does the land give us the stories, thus inventing us?
–Paula Gunn Allen
This exhibition is supported by the S. Melvin and Mary Jo Rines Art Exhibition Fund.
