HELEN GLAZER | Canada Glacier from Lake Fryxell, Antarctica, 2024

This piece came out of a 2015 residency in Antarctica through the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. I worked out of remote Antarctic scientific field camps, including one in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, a largely ice free area where I took the photographs on site for this sculpture while standing on Lake Fryxell, a permanently frozen inland freshwater lake. My goal was to capture and communicate experiences of remote places that few people get to witness in person. Some of the photographs are produced as archival prints. I also make sculptures of landscape forms generated from a series of still photographs taken on site and reconstructed as 3D scans by photogrammetry software. After further editing in 3D modeling software, the resulting digital files become the basis for hand-painted sculptures made with digital fabrication technologies — in this case, a 3D printer. They provide the viewer a visceral experience of form and texture that differs from the flat image and fixed point of view delivered by a photographic print. I have also produced a five-foot-wide sculpture from this file, which is part of the exhibition Helen Glazer: Walking in Antarctica, currently touring the US through 2027 under the auspices of the Mid-America Arts Alliance. That exhibition also includes a large print of one of the 162 source photos for the 3D file. 

BIO

Helen Glazer’s work in photography and photogrammetry-based sculpture is informed by scientific insights into interacting forces affecting ecosystems and shaping landscapes, including the impact of human activity and decisions. She has spent her entire career since her early 20s as a working artist. Over time, her focus shifted from drawing and painting, to painted sculpture, to a current emphasis on photography and photo-based sculpture combining digital fabrication and hand finishing. She has also completed two large public art projects. Photography became central to her process about 15 years ago to investigate and understand complex, ephemeral forms in nature, and capture the quirky incidents and surprising and evocative moments of transformation. Her past experiences working in other media still inform the way she perceives the world and presents it in her photographs. In 2013 she began exploring new photographic technologies, creating 3D scans from still photographs via photogrammetry and producing hand-painted sculpture from them, a process she continues to refine. Experiences as a year-long Baltimore Ecosystem Study artist-in-residence and as a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grantee in 2015 have shaped her most recent projects.

From her Antarctic residency came the solo exhibition Walking in Antarctica which premiered at Goucher College, Baltimore, funded with grants from the Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance and Puffin Foundation. The show has been on a five-year tour of US museums and galleries under the auspices of ExhibitsUSA (eusa.org) since 2022, with seven past and confirmed upcoming venues in six states to date. Two photos from the project enlarged to 7 x 10 feet are in a rotating exhibition at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. Another billboard-size enlargement was in a year-long outdoor exhibition at the Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes in Buenos Aires, Argentina from April 2023 to March 2024. The Center for Art + Environment of the Nevada Museum of Art houses her Antarctica archive and purchased one of her glacier sculptures for their collection. She has been interviewed by Vice Media’s Creators Project, AtlasObscura.com, Adobe 99U Magazine, and WYPR, Baltimore’s NPR news station. In 2012 she received an Individual Artist Award in photography from the Maryland State Arts Council and had a solo show of her photographs at Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York. She received a grant from the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation to fund a photography project begun in 2021 of the former US Sondrestrom Air Base in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland for an eventual book. The Kangerlussuaq Museum mounted a permanent exhibition based on her photographs in 2023, funded by a grant from the US Embassy in Copenhagen.

Glazer graduated cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in art and earned an M.F.A. from the Mount Royal School of the Maryland Institute College of Art, also studying at the renowned Skowhegan School of Art. Her works are in private and public collections, which in addition to those mentioned above include the Fairfield University Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Chautauqua Institution, and two public art murals in Baltimore.