https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIKZk3iqyTw
Time-Lapse Videos
and Interviews
In 2020 as we were preparing for the Republican Convention that August, Johanna Drucker, author, book artist and UCLA professor emerita visited our Brooklyn Navy Yard studio to talk about our Melted Away projects. The conversation was fun and wide-ranging.
July 25, 2016
The American Dream Project
During both conventions in 2016 we installed sculptures weighing over 4,000 pounds, carved out of ice spelling out the words The American Dream. At Transformer Station in Cleveland, in collaboration with the City Club of Cleveland we hosted a colloquium on the impacts of inequity on the American Dream. One week later we installed the same phrase at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. The sculptures in both locations melted away in less than 6 hours.
September 21, 2014
Dawn of the Anthropocene
On September 21, 2014 during the People’s Climate March, we installed a 3,500 pound ice sculpture of the words The Future at the crossroads of Fifth Avenue and 23 Street in New York. Hundreds of people witnessed The Future disappear.
“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
This video compresses the 13 hour event into 4 minutes.
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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
In the fall of 2010, when congress debated extending the Bush tax cuts, Senator Bernie Sanders took to the floor and delivered an 8 and one half hour speech about the impact of corporate greed on economic decline.
The Senator’s speech became the sound track for our video timelapse of the installation. …A THOUSAND CUTS documents the destruction and disappearance of the Middle Class. Seen by over 60,000 people on the internet, Senator Sanders featured it on his Senate website and Rachel Maddow featured it on her program.
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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
In the final weeks of the 2008 election as the threat of world economic collapse and catastrophe grew, the connections between what was happening – an economic tsunami bigger than the Great Depression and the policies of the Bush Administration became clear.
As the economic forecasts darkened. we installed Main Street Meltdown in front of the New York Supreme Court building on the Great Depression’s 79th anniversary – just days shy before the general election.
