https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIKZk3iqyTw
Time-Lapse Videos
and Interviews
As we prepare for the Republican Convention this coming August 2020, we’ve been taking our time at home to examine our past public artworks at the conventions.
Johanna Drucker, author, book artist and UCLA professor visited our Brooklyn Navy Yard studio this past June 2019 to talk about our Melted Away project providing a wonderful opportunity to film the discussion that ensued.
Ben Wolf shot the interview.
July 25, 2016
The American Dream Project
Artists LigoranoReese installed a sculpture weighing over 4,000 pounds, carved out of ice on the grounds of Independence Mall in Philadelphia during the Democratic National Convention. One week earlier they had installed another sculpture spelling the same phrase at the Republican Convention in Cleveland. The sculptures in both locations melted away in less than 6 hours.
September 21, 2014
Dawn of the Anthropocene
On September 21, 2014 LigoranoReese installed a 3,500 pound ice sculpture of the words The Future at Fifth Avenue and 23 Street in New York during the People’s Climate March. This video compresses the 13 hour event into 4 minutes.
“A century’s carelessness is now melting away the world’s storehouses of ice, a melting whose momentum may be nearing the irreversible. It’s as if we were stripping the spectrum of a color or eradicating one note from every octave.” Bill McKibben, January 2006
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Sculpture Design – Nora Ligorano; Editor – Marshall Reese; Music – Ernst Reijseger; Color Correction – Eli Friedman; Ice Sculpture – Okamoto Studio
For more information:
Music: ernstreijseger.com
Climate Action Partners: 350.org, Human Impacts Institute
June 18, 2011
Morning in America
As congress debated the fiscal budget LigoranoReese presented their third ice sculpture Morning In America in the garden of Jim Kempner Fine Art in New York City.
…A THOUSAND CUTS is the time-lapse video of the Middle Class’ disappearance. Over 60,000 people have seen it on the internet. Senator Bernie Sanders featured it on his Senate website and Rachel Maddow reported on it.
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Senator Bernie Sanders’ 8-hour Senate floor filibuster against the Bush tax cuts punctuates the disintegration of the middle class sculpture, orchestrated to music by composer/violinist Michael Galasso.
The artists reinstalled the sculpture during the 2012 conventions in public parks in Tampa and Charlotte.
… politics, in addition to being the form that government takes, is also a form of theater (as if we’d ever forgotten). Artists making smart work about politics understand this — it’s why Ligorano/Reese’s massive melting ice sculpture of the words “middle class” is improbably effective, at least when recorded and paired with a rousing speech by Bernie Sanders: because the artists turn the showmanship of politics into critique.
– Jilian Steinhauer, Hyperallergic
Special Thanks
Dru Arstark, Anthony Caputo, Jim Kempner, Dan Walworth, Okamoto Studio, Postworks NY
The entire text of Senator Sanders speech is available as a book, published by Nation Books, The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class.
November 2008
Main Street Meltdown
As the 2008 election drew to a close, LigoranoReese felt it essential to connect the economic crisis and recession to the policies of the Bush Administration. Throughout the month of October as the artists were developing the installation, economic forecasts continued to darken. They decided to time the installation with the anniversary of the stock market crash of October 29, 1929, the Great Depression’s 79th anniversary coinciding with the final week of the 2008 election.
