A loud cracking—a loud cracking and then a long pause. Seconds later a fissure appears and a chunk of ice the size of an apartment building crashes into the water. In an altered state, water meets water, and this act of displacement causes a seismic wave. Expressions of awe (gasps, whoas) are soon accompanied by laughter and clapping—another kind of “cracking up.”* When faced with the incomprehensible, our impulse can be to laugh. In theatre, corpsing is a term used to describe convulsive laughter that breaks an actor out of character while playing a deceased body. In Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir writes about the disjuncture between understanding and expression, where an unexpected, or perhaps inappropriate, humorous reaction can “shake us out of our deadness.” 

It's within a certain contemporary deadness of images that Claire Greenshaw explores the alchemy of (dis)comfort. A product of our heavily digital world, the instant gratification of the reshare often replaces close attention; emphasizing the transactional nature of likes results in forgetting to actually look. The distance between attention and images participates in a widely disembodied experience of realities mediated through screens. In contrast to this pull of immediacy, Greenshaw’s process is expansively slow. Suggesting parallels between the time of images and the time of human bodies, as sharing a trajectory of making, reception and erasure, she reminds us that both have histories and share the potential of being forgotten. Through her insistence on intimacy amongst her body, her drawing surface, and her references, Greenshaw disrupts the usual distance between subject and object. For her, source materials are “scripts'' and drawing itself a “residual process.”

In this exhibition three large-scale drawings of glaciers—the Athabasca (Alberta), Lyell (California), and Doomsday (Antarctica)—are re-enacted. Accruing time and attention, Greenshaw undermines any nostalgic or precious associations with the glaciers by inviting her children and students to efface the drawings. Armed with erasers, they were encouraged to alter the surfaces of the works. Beyond an explicit connection to the visible impacts of climate change, this gesture considers the time of art in relation to the extra-human time of nature—an awakening of the deadened or emptied out image—in which expressions of embodiment, similar to laughter, function as a kind of disarmament.

*This description responds to a video with sound of an audience reacting to the The Perito Moreno Glacier (Argentinian Patagonia) calving shot on November 26, 2022.

Installation Images by Toni Hafkenscheid

Claire Greenshaw (b. 1980, Cardiff, UK) is a visual artist and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at York University, where her creative research is supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Graduate Scholarship. Her artwork focuses on drawing, the circulation of images and the experience of time under late capitalism and the Anthropocene. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (Halifax) and Master of Fine Arts from the Glasgow School of Art. Select exhibitions include Minuseins (Vienna), Griffin Art Projects (Vancouver),  Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), The Power Plant (Toronto) and Royal Standard (Liverpool) amongst many other presentations across Canada, the USA, UK and Europe.